Yesterday, I re-watched Grace Chen’s keynote that she gave
last week at Twitter Math Camp (TMC). If you haven’t watched it yet, check it
out
here
and
here—it is
totally worth 50 minutes of your day. Her talk left me almost in tears at TMC,
so I wanted to watch to take it all in again and to try to figure out what
about the talk I found so powerful. After re-watching (and re-playing to
transcribe so many moments that I wanted a written record of), I was about to
sit down to write this post. However, I was soon interrupted when a
non-math-teacher friend of mine showed up for dinner. So instead of writing, I
tried to describe to my friend what Grace’s talk was about and its impact on me.
I told her that it was about how teaching is necessarily political. That there are
many narratives and that the people who are in power choose the ones that are
told over and over again. That as individuals we shouldn’t just accept these
stories, these policies, these ways of living as the way it is. Instead we need
to be making conscious and communicable choices about what narratives we are
perpetuating. Even as I was saying this, I was frustrated, because I felt like
I wasn’t conveying the power of Grace’s words.
So today, I want to step back, and try again to figure out
why this talk made me feel a sense of clarity, understanding, hope, shame,
frustration, belonging, pride, purpose, overwhelm, power, relief, and camaraderie.
1. It’s Personal
One reason was its deeply personal nature.
In the context of her father giving up his Taiwanese
citizenship and emigrating to the U.S., Grace told us that she sometimes asks
people what would have to happen for them to give up their American
citizenship. She then shared with us her own answer:
“I think there’s not much that would convince me to give up my American
citizenship because as screwed as this country is and as terrible of decisions
I think our government has made over years and years and years, it’s still a
pretty incredible place and it has the potential to be the beacon of freedom my
dad thought it was. And this is my home.”
I had the privilege of growing up
in a town in MA that did a lot of questioning and criticism of America—both its
history and its current policies. Along
with the need to search for the counter-narratives and erased narratives, this
also taught me to have a sense of shame and embarrassment about being an
American. I appreciate Grace’s example here of being able to “hold multiple
truths simultaneously.” America is screwed up and she has hope for its future and
it is her home. This is a more complex view than the one that I grew up with,
but it is also one that seems more true/illustrative of the whole story and
more empowering to live with.
Grace also became extremely personal with her message by
telling the story of her grandmothers and the political history of Taiwan in
how it relates to her and her family. Grace told us that:
“All history is political history because what gets told depends on who
is in power, what gets allowed to be told, and what gets whispered about behind
closed doors. That doesn’t mean any history is more or less true than another,
but to function in this reality we have to learn to hold multiple truths
simultaneously. But that doesn’t mean every truth is equally valid.”
This
is not a new concept to me. However, it meant so much more to me when it was
being said in the context of the different Taiwanese political history stories
she shared with us. So when Grace then said:
“The reason I don’t believe that story [that the history of Taiwan
starts in 1949] is because I think it ignores, disrespects, and dehumanizes the
lives and labor of millions of people over century. And I believe that because
I see myself, my family, and people like me being ignored and [something I
can’t hear]. But whether you believe my story or the 1949 story, is a choice
that people make, either by default or deliberately, based on their values and
experiences. I argue that it is our ethical responsibility to make those
choices consciously, rather than defaulting to whatever we hear loudest, or
whatever we hear more of, or whatever we hear people in power say, and to be
able to communicate the reasoning and values behind our choices.”
she made me care
about her, her family, and people like her. And that further motivates me to
make conscious choices about what stories to believe and value.
And then she also made it personal for me in thinking about
my students and classroom. I am a biracial Asian/white woman who came from an
upper middle class background teaching predominantly black and Latino students,
many of whom are living in poverty.
“Like
my grandmothers, my students weren’t poor and hungry because they didn’t work
hard, or because they had no ambitions, or because they made poor choices. They
weren’t poor and hungry because of “cultural priorities,” a term that is often
used to mask deficit assumptions about people who are not white and middle
class… But the story that I am telling you instead, is that like my
grandmothers, my students were poor and hungry for political reasons. This kind
of story is a counter-story, or counter-narrative because it confronts and
disrupts the prevailing view.”
This is the story that I want my friends, my
family, the mainstream media, and really everyone to value and believe. And one
thing that I am taking from this talk is that it is part of my job to tell this
story to people who might not otherwise hear it or to people who might
unconsciously be choosing to believe one of the other narratives about why my
students are poor (or more generally why people are poor in America). And I need to do a better job in researching
and articulating exactly what those political reasons are.
2. It’s a Math Classroom
I think the other reason that Grace’s talk was so powerful
and made me feel so many things is because she talked about these ideas in the
context of a classroom, and specifically a math classroom.
Here was one of Grace’s big points:
There’s a prevailing narrative that math is not influenced
by people, cultural contexts, governmental policies, or anything else. There’s
this idea that math has some sort of purity outside of people and that “math is
math is math.” And yet here’s what Grace said to a room full of math teachers:
“Likewise, my students’ stories didn’t start
when they entered my classroom, or when they opened a math textbook, or even
when they enrolled school. Their stories started generations ago, also
influenced by people, cultural context, and governmental policies."
"Who
you are as a math teacher doesn’t just start when you wake up and drive to
school, or when you plan a lesson, or in your teacher prep program. Who you are
as a teacher started generations ago, shaped by the people who raised you, who
inspired you, the people who challenged you, people who may have tried to hold
you back. Your story is shaped by cultural context, what foods and languages
and mannerisms you consider normal and what you take for granted. And your
story is shaped by governmental policies that control education, employment,
housing, access to resources. But who you are is not wholly determined by all of
that. And that not wholly determined is where my hopefulness lies.”
And so
this makes me want to better examine how the choices I am making in the
classroom (consciously and unconsciously) are influenced by my experiences and
history and what I can do differently than how I have been conditioned to think
and act. It also makes me want to think about what are the narratives my
students have been told about themselves and math and what are the
counter-narratives I want us to explore together. And how can I invite and take
advantage of their histories and stories in our math classroom.
And this is a conversation that I haven’t found there’s
really space for or is a priority in the education world as a whole. I have
pockets of people who I can talk with about how education, and math in
particular, is political and what implications that has on us. But certainly I
haven’t done this in an organized or sanctioned way. And so I want to finish by
saying that I’m hoping to continue the conversation on these prompts that Grace
gave us—with people at my school, with other educator friends in my district,
and with educators friends online.
- Create a Microcosm
“One of my academic heroes, Kevin Kumashiro, writes that
stereotypes aren’t harmful just because they are untrue. Even though they do generalize, they do make
assumptions, they do erase complex and nuanced stories, they are harmful
because every time they are repeated they recall and recite history [or
oppression].”
I have made a place to start doing some of this work
here.
- Teach to Gray Areas
“But when we teach the power of mathematics, we can also
teach its limitations—what it cannot understand or interpret or predict on its
own.”
- Explore Alternatives
“Politics is a way of valuing our way of finger counting
over their way of finger counting. And exploring the idea of alternate
mathematics helps us recognize that what we take for granted is just one of
multiple, possible stories.”
“The version of U.S. school mathematics that emphasizes
universal, and generalizable, and abstract, I think of it almost as an analogy
to the 1949 story of Taiwanese political history. Or maybe it’s the 1895
version. It’s hard to tell whether your history of mathematics is complete or
if it’s true or something you want to stand behind, until you take the time to
consider other possibilities.”
- Where else have you seen different ways of doing
mathematics, and what values do they communicate?
- What do these ways of thinking mathematically offer?
And so I will just finish (this post, I am committed to continuing
to think and act) with a couple more quotes from Grace
“So when I say that our choices should be conscious and
communicable about the stories we are telling and the policies we are living
out, our mathematics should be conscious and communicable as well. On top of
that, I would encourage us to think about the values that underlie our
conscious, and communicable mathematics.”
“The mathematics that we value depends on our context, and I
think one thing we can do in our classrooms is to be really explicit about that
when we can. Not to not teach it, but to teach the alternative, to teach
different ways of thinking, and to say that in this context this makes a lot of
sense, in this other context this might make more sense."
