Everyone Is a Math Person: Perspective from a Teacher and a Mom

Everyone is a math person.  As Howie Hua says, “We are all people and we all do math.”  At our spring MCTM conference, these words resonated with me and I began to consider my students and my own children.

  

Pictured are my son and daughter.  Both are creative, kind, and bold.  One has a learning disability, but both are math people.  This year is our year, Minnesota!  It is the year that we embrace our new 2022 math standards and begin changing the belief that math ability is inherited.

Math abilities and skills are learned in the classroom.  All students have the right to access.  My son is the one with a learning disability, but he observes and notices patterns that I don’t even see.  While driving to school one day, he was folding his napkin from his bagel.  He told me he was making arrays with it and was able to make a 2×2, 2×4, 2×8, 4×8, and continued to try to see the maximum number of squares he could make until he couldn’t fold it any more.  After folding he would exclaim that 2×2 was 4 and 2×4 was 8!  He told me he was also finding the area and how many squares were in his napkin.  The joy that came with folding a napkin still makes me smile.

Encourage curiosity this year and begin to see math in everyday ways.  There are so many things you can show with a plain old napkin.  Anyone truly is a math person and just needs the confidence to be a math lover!