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...
Tag: education
the construction of knowledge
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...
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...
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....
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 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...
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...
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. ...
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 ...
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...
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 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...
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...