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, an...
Author: Fig Tree
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,...
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...
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 n...
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 importa...
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...
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 ...