A Classroom has a Soul
When I was in seminary, I had planned my master’s thesis around the title “Psyche and Spirit in the Classroom.” I see now that this was a skew frame, at an awkw...
Author: Fig Tree
Sonar the Sheepdog and Toad the Terror take a personality test!
It’s summer vacation, so it’s time to think about…personality tests! I was speaking with a colleague a few weeks ago about our Myers Briggs types. I have an int...
My True Teacher
Having a childAfter 18 months I still can't sayWhat it's like 4th Ave & 12th St, Manhattan
On listening in math
I met with a student for extra help. Call her K. K is in 9th grade this year, is new to the school, and has returned her last two math quizzes blank. To her cre...
American Psyche
Originally posted on 10/18/2020, thought I’d share it here. In the ancient Greek used in the Gospels, the word for soul is “psyche”, as contrasted with the word...
Confronting Whiteness with White Students
In January of 2020, I co-facilitated a two-day workshop on whiteness, race, and racism with a group of white high school students. I had designed the workshop w...
Clouds of Witness
I was in Austin, Texas for a few days before I really looked up at the sky. I saw churning clouds under a hot sun, a favorite object of contemplation of mine in...
The Math Koan, or: Zen Problem Solving
I wrote an article that the good people at Lion’s Roar published. You can find it here!
Anxiety and Frustration in the Math Classroom: My NCTM Presentation, Fall 2018
It’s been a while! Playing a little catch up. First: Below is the slideshow I presented at the NCTM Regional Conference this past November in Seattle. It’s spar...
Math as Witness: who counts? who doesn’t?
I ended the school year with a surprising burst of energy after the students left for the summer. I slogged my way through two straight days of comment-writing....
Our Aeonic Fire
Book of Serenity #30: Dasui’s Aeonic Fire A monk asked Dasui, “When the fire at the end of an aeon rages through and the whole universe is destroyed, is this de...
Living close to my own life
Book of Serenity #20: Dizang’s Nearness Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going?” Fayan said, “Around on pilgrimage.” Dizang said, “What is the purpose of pilg...
Paul made me a Buddhist
I was reading about the apostle Paul over the holiday, and thinking of his participation in a turning point in my life. Early in my Buddhist practice I was volu...
Social and Emotional Factors in the Math Classroom (a few initial notes)
I’m trying this thing where I write a quick blog post after an energizing conversation. Wish me luck! This year at open school night, I gave my students’ parent...
Skillful means for math students and showing up for teacher work
Dear Reader, it is late August! School is beginning soon! For me, that means it’s time to reflect on my goals while I still have the bandwidth to do so. I ended...
Teaching and Skillful Means
The end of the school year is the best time to think about the next school year, since obviously I’ve got nothing else going on. I’m working on a few things to ...
Math, in search of meaning
What does math mean? And what should it mean for my students? The answer to both these questions is up for grabs and not initially apparent. It requires an inte...
Math Class for America
So the election happened. Today, the students at my school felt scared, sad, angry, anxious, and confused, but gave such energetic and clear expression to so ma...
Theological values in secular math education
Before continuing to look at math education in the light of, on one hand, a drastically uncertain future, and on the other, values inherent in that work that we...
Math for the End of the World (Part I): Rising Seas, Hope, and Math Education
…or, Eschatonimatics? Apocalyptic Curves? Oh these are truly terrible. When I last wrote about the PBL method of teaching math, I said that I often thought of t...
To teach the right answers for the wrong reasons/my own experience is not for all seasons
(With apologies to T.S. Eliot…) My students sometimes ask if I actually like math, or what brought me to be a math teacher. I have struggled to answer, and for ...
Stepping Back
I’ve been to a handful of silent retreats before, so when my teachers on this most recent one said, “don’t try to get anything out of this,” I knew what they me...
PBL: Peoples’ Math and Not-Knowing Math
Yesterday, I had my first meeting with colleagues preparing for the new school year. I am still happily entrenched in the pace of the summer (the only tolerable...
Reflections after a silent retreat
I returned from my zendo’s ten-day silent retreat just yesterday, called a “sesshin” (which means “gathering the mind”). This is not my first time on sesshin, b...
The Author of Violence and Staying Awake
In the midst of my theological education, I came to an understanding of why the existence of evil in our world was so often attributed to a conscious entity, ca...
Teaching for modes of being — play and monasticism
I was pretty ambitious, and notably abstract early on. And come to think of it, I will continue to be. BUT, now I have something a little closer to experience. ...
More like you than you
I’ve often felt an affinity for the marginalized. It comes from an early place in my life of feeling marginalized myself — powerless or less important or unable...
Teaching Math at Sing Sing
I spent a year teaching high school math at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison some 20 miles north of New York City. I was a graduate st...
Psyche in the Classroom: Teachers and Therapists
When I first began studying depth psychology, I couldn’t stop thinking about my years of experience teaching math to high school students. It seemed to me then ...
I know they say this tent is waterproof but I’ve pitched it at sea.
On the meaning of the teaching of Origen of Alexandria, from his Of Tents and Wells. And so, contemplating in the Spirit these progressions, he calls them the “...
Why leave the palace?
As the story goes, Shakyamuni Buddha was a prince in northern India. Before his birth, it was prophesied that he was destined to become one of two things: a gre...
On the “broad and generous spirit…”
In my last post, I ended with Darlene Cohen on the benefits of facing our pain, rather than distracting from it or trying to push it away: …you begin to feel ge...
On entering the pain
This year I am participating in a yearlong workshop at the Village Zendo called The Path of Awakening, focusing on Zen responses to the Others we create accordi...
On obedience, attention, and freedom
It’s snowing, a lot, everywhere, so this morning I was reading Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic (obviously). In the first installment of hi...
Applying the compassionate infrastructure (New Year’s reboot)
And we’re back. When I first started this blog in September I had pretty grand designs for what and how I was going to write here. Looking back, I think more of...
On Columbus and a New World
So I woke up thinking about the New World, because it’s Columbus Day. The big irony is that his New World was nothing new, that he didn’t discover anything beca...
On the power to create mathematics
This post continues where “the power to create” left off. I’m going to expand on what it means to rely on the phrase “the power to create mathematics”. Creating...
A meditation on the first day of school
This is a honkadori that I love, based on a story in the Lotus Sutra in which a character doesn’t realize that he’s a bodhisattva, a Buddhist saint dedicated to...
On the power to create
“What is teaching?” A Haiku by Bill Maroon We meet awkwardly I invite you to walk I find you dancing From Teaching and the Religious Imagination by Maria Harris...
On prepping for the first day of school
This week and next, I start at my new job at a progressive school in Manhattan, teaching middle and high school math. This is my fourth school setting, right on...
On religion in the news, the Republican debate, and reading ‘Fun Home’ at Duke
I will write about religion in the news. There are two good reasons to do this: The way some religious people make news misrepresents what it looks like to do s...
Dharma Combat with Augustine
On the meaning of the teaching of St. Augustine of Hippo, addressing God in the first paragraph of his Confessions: You have made us for yourself, and our heart...
On a secular theology
Much of what I write on this blog will be notes toward a secular theology. The fact that I write as a “Theological Engineer” might already suggest that my theol...
On systems
Systems are scientific constructs, but I’ll often be talking about them in terms of social justice and theology. I’ll connect them here. A system is a collectio...
About the Theological Engineer
I’m a math-teacher theologian Zen-Buddhist New-Yorker. I have studied and practiced engineering, education, theology, depth psychology, and all of the above app...