Week 13 2024-2025 in Review

Dear TCC Families,

What a rich week we had. Our small group from last week stretched and expanded and returned to its usual size. We pivoted and responded with agility to absences and other surprises. The schedule of offerings on our board was so full - Current Events & Histories of Resistance, TCC Awesome Math, History of Life, Dance Class, and Cookie Decorating. We rescheduled Community Wellbeingness and Dumplings for next week. The shadow schedule included grocery shopping, list-making, scaling recipes and other cooking preparations, building electric circuits, beadwork and "button-making," drawing, many card and role-playing games, small-group treks to the almost-frozen pond, drawing games, tree climbing, story writing, lots of reading, and some clay work. These are just the bits we observed. 

A focal point of the week was TCC Awesome math, for a few reasons. And this experience gives us an opportunity to consider what that represents, both in the seen and unseen, and to invite some shared reflection. It may press against our edges, and be a little uncomfortable. It may stretch our collective thinking. 

Will you join us?

Here's the "math story" of the week:

A is baking and decorating cookies. She has ______ rainbow sprinkles to put on these cookies. If she decorates each cookie with exactly ______ sprinkles, how many cookies can she decorate with the sprinkles she has? 

A (10,000; 10)     B (10,000; 20)     C (50, 10)     D (799,201; 1/10)     E (800, ¼)      F (20, 5) 

This problem structure and the number sets were written with consideration of the thinking strategies and awareness of number relationships the young people share when we talk math. These elements are not random - they're very deliberate. This could be considered a "low floor, high ceiling" math scenario - accessible to all (the floor), with the capacity to stretch in myriad directions and with varying complexity (the ceiling). Some young people accessed the problem by drawing pictures and counting blocks. Others experimented with different notation as they captured their thinking about this problem. Another used it as an opportunity to explore functions, research the difference between a relation and a function, and generate ordered pairs that could be graphed, based on the relationship of the variables here to one another. 

Aside from the rich mathematics, the problem spurred conversations about consent, about what we've come to refer to as "bubble bursting," how we can care for one another's needs for autonomy of thought, and also honor our desires to hear from one another about the strategies we've used while practicing partnership and consent. 

"Bubble bursting" is a term the young people here generated long ago.

It refers to the sense we all have at one time or another when someone else intrudes on our thinking - this may happen when someone blurts an answer while we're still processing, when someone says, "Do it this way" or "Why don't you" or even expresses a silent but palpable impatience or judgement about our thinking or learning process. This phrase came out of our math work together but applies to all of our interactions. Part of the inner work of ongoing deschooling is noticing our impulses to impart our thinking or judgements or ways of doing, pausing them, and then turning towards them with curiosity. Why do we feel the need to comment on, judge, or interrupt someone else's process? Why do we feel urgency to impart knowledge? Where does that come from? If sharing something is important to us, how can we do it in a way that honors consent and places relationship at the center?

The question of "but how will they learn math?!" is one that comes up so often in self-directed spaces, and speaks to one of the more quintessential fears parents and caregivers bring to SDE. It intensifies as young people get older. The reasons for this are many. We have some ideas and theories about why this may be. We also know that math is the discipline that young people coming to us from conventional school have almost unanimously disliked. Their math wounds are deep. This is consistent with what other SDE facilitators in other places share. Why might that be? Is it the math, or is it something else? 

Sarah here, with an interlude: I want to share that many years ago, after nurturing my passion for "teaching" mathematics by listening to young people, and before I understood and embraced Self-Directed Education, I was attending a biennial Cognitively Guided Instruction conference. During a session there, we watched a video of a six year-old girl solve with confidence and ease something called the "bus problem." This is a classic problem that is well-known in math education literature because beginning at about fourth grade, children in conventional school struggle to solve it. Adults also often struggle. As we discussed at our table why this problem becomes challenging, a well-known professor and researcher leaned over to me and whispered, "Because by fourth grade kids' ability to think has all been schooled out of them." 

Back to that question - is it the math, or is it something else?

We'll leave you with a new-to-us take on a long-held sentiment titled The Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart, and drop a reminder from one of the Agile Learning Center maxims: we learn more from the culture of which we are a part than the content we are taught. What are the cultural messages we internalize from math class? What's being communicated about what it means to "learn" math, how we "do" math, what math even is? About how we learn and what it means to learn something and who's in charge of any of that happening? And then if we imagine the absence of these lessons in our children's lives, what do we fear? 

What if understanding and connection and joy took their place?

What if they could learn math, and leave the rest behind? 

With gratitude and care,

Emily, Sarah, and Zoey