Here are a couple of terrifying tweets from my summer.

Twitterverse, I need your help! I am going to be teaching math next year for the first time. 7th grade! I’ve previously taught ELA & SS. Any teachers/gurus I should follow? Advice/tips for me? Resources you recommend? I know @Desmos is a good resource! #iteachmath #WEAreLakota

— Emily Ladrigan (@EmilyLadrigan) June 28, 2019

I’ll be teaching 7th grade math next year. Switching from Social Studies. Any tips or helpful websites?? #iteachmath

— Ms. Nesmith (@ms_nesmith) July 24, 2019

I saw those tweets and had to sit back and collect myself.

That’s because I know how well I’m served by my knowledge of mathematics, how that knowledge helps me find value in early student thinking, how that knowledge helps me connect and build on thoughts from different students that, without that knowledge, might seem totally unrelated.

This isn’t a critique of those two newly drafted math teachers at all. Most of my horror here results from the thought of being drafted to teach history after a career teaching math. So what can they do?

You’ll find lots of people in those threads recommending resources and curricula. But resources and curricula are only as good as the teacher using them. A developing teacher can make a good resource bad and an expert teacher can make a bad resource good. (This is why John Mason prefers to talk about “rich teaching” instead of “rich tasks.”)

So my own advice is for these teachers trained in the humanities to focus on their teaching, not the resources or curricula.

Specifically, I hope they’ll resist the idea that math should be taught any differently than the humanities. I hope they’ll resist the idea that only the humanities deal in subjectivity, argumentation, and personal interpretation, while math represents objective, inarguable, abstract truth.

Math is only objective, inarguable, and abstract for questions defined so narrowly they’re almost useless to students, teachers, and the world itself.

In social studies, an analogous question might ask students to recall the date of the Louisiana Purchase or the name of the king who signed the Magna Carta — questions that are so abstracted from their context, so narrowly defined, and so objective that they make no contribution to a student’s ability to think historically.

The National Council for the Social Studies describes what’s necessary for students of social studies:

Students learn to assess the merits of competing arguments, and make reasoned decisions that include consideration of the values within alternative policy recommendations. [..] Through discussions, debates, the use of authentic documents, simulations, research, and other occasions for critical thinking and decision making, students learn to apply value-based reasoning when addressing problems and issues.

All of which rhymes perfectly with recommendations from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics:

Teaching mathematics with high expectations for all students in mathematical reasoning, sense making, and problem solving invites students to learn to identify assumptions, develop arguments, and make connections within mathematical topics and to other contexts and disciplines.

Teaching math like the humanities asks us to:

• Broaden the scope of the problems we assign. We can always narrow the scope in collaboration with students but the opposite isn’t true. Students don’t have the opportunity to “identify assumptions,” for example, if we pre-assume every detail in the problem.
• Focus on mathematical ideas that are big enough to be understood in different ways. Ask students to make claims that demand to be argued and interpreted rather than evaluated by an authority for correctness.
• Celebrate novel student contributions to mathematics. History is made every day and so is mathematics. If our students leave our classes this year without understanding that they have had made unique and original contributions to how humans think mathematically, we have defined “mathematics” too narrowly. (For example, someone just decided to call this shape a “golygon.” If that person has the right to notice and name things, then so do your students.)

Instead of the worksheet above, show your students this video of a pallet of bricks and then immediately hide it.

“Does anybody have a guess about how many bricks we saw up there?”

“Did anybody notice any features about the bricks that might help us figure out exactly how many bricks we saw there?”

“Let’s look at the video again. Okay, what’s the most efficient way you can think to figure out the number of bricks.”

“How were you thinking about the number of bricks you figured out? What assumptions did you make?”

“Someone else got a different answer from you. How do you think they thinking about the number of bricks?”

“Here’s the number of bricks. What’s another question we could ask now?”

These questions rhyme with the kinds of questions you’d hear in a productive, engaging humanities classroom, questions which are no less possible in mathematics!

Humanizing math class means teaching like the humanities. And if you’re joining us from the humanities, please be generous with your pedagogy. We need all of it.

BTW: This is my contribution to the Virtual Conference on Humanizing Mathematics, a fantastic learning opportunity hosted by Hema Khodai and Sam Shah through the month of August 2019.