This math is… different…
Sometimes the math looks different from what most of us remember, and if you’ve sat down to help with homework lately, you know exactly what I mean. You come to the table ready to be useful, and the page is…
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To Know Me is to Know My Starbucks Order
Do I truly love my venti cold brew with oat milk? Is it force of habit? Could I even handle a morning without it? All questions I often ask myself. Another question that came to mind recently was what is…
Early Numeracy at Work
Early Numeracy at work! The math just shows up, when you look for it, in small moments. My nephew gets major credit for being the only one of the cousins willing to help me set the table for pizza night…
June 21st: Solstice Geometry and Uncle Woody
Today is the summer solstice. I am in Gloucester, Massachusetts, north of Boston, the part of the world from which my family harkens. We had a lovely dinner tonight overlooking Ipswich Bay, where the sunset is spectacular. It is one…
Smoots, Kleins, and … your ‘you’-nit!
I came across this most charming article the other day, about a funny new unit of measurement called the “smoot” and named after Oliver R. Smoot Jr. who was in MIT’s class of 1962 who in 1958 lay his body…
Subtraction Interaction
It is time to expose the secret double life of subtraction. It all comes down to that foundational number sense we work with students to develop as they grow as elementary school mathematicians. We give students the opportunity to build…
Books and Big (highly relevant to math) Ideas
The final Books and Big Ideas of the 2025-2026 school year has taken place, and the story so carefully chosen by our incredible Lower School librarian was The Magical Yet by Angela DiTerlizzi. A math educator could not have wished…
On Making Mistakes in Math
A true story “My dad says mistakes are good,” a second grader shared. “He said they help you learn.” We were discussing the importance of giving hard things a try, even if we don’t always succeed. “It is sort of…
On Fact Fluency
Sometimes the best definition is so brief and obvious…if you were to ask me just yesterday how to define fact fluency I would have given you a mouthful of alphabet soup teacher-ese. This morning, over coffee, shuffling through some of…
Why Seekers & Solvers?
A note on the name of this blog. I listened to the most beautiful description of what we want to build in mathematicians several weeks ago. A brilliant colleague of mine (Pete Prince, to be specific, who is co-head of…