Suzanne's Column
April, 2000
Reaching out, and coming home.
I just got an email from my mother. She discovered our site, and tried one of our weekly Math Challenges. She wrote to tell me what she'd come up with, and asked if even she could learn math from the site.
Wow, I thought. Mom did one of our math excursions. Like most parents, my mother hasn't "done" math since she was in school. Like most people without kids in the house, she doesn't have math books lying around, or think much about it. Like most people, she doesn't think she can do math. But when she got to that math excursion, she didn't click away. She tried it. She did it.
I got another email from a student who thanked us for not offering an easy formula for math success, for telling the truth about its toughness, for keeping heart and soul in it. As I read her email, I could see that in its toughness, she's finding her own.
These correspondences arrived in the midst of great preparations for launching the site to a wider audience than ever before. In the middle of the month, we'll be in Chicago for the annual NCTM conference of 20,000 math teachers. We have arranged to have a special guest at our booth signing autographs and distributing tidbits and wisdom. (Teachers: please stop by and say 'hello!') This is the publication month for a text for students in the Phillipines, in which some of our work has been included. And this month, readers from 41 countries are visiting our site.
How perfect that in this month of our widest outreach, Newton's Window "came home." My mom tried it. She did one of the challenges, and she wants to learn more. It's been a crazy time here, with long hours and all our focus going into planning and providing new resources for kids, their parents, and their teachers. None of us think very much about math for our parents.
But it's perfect. Our belief, all along, is that hard math isn't just for "math people," that we don't need to water it down, or sugar coat it, or pretend it's something that it isn't.
A few years ago, I attended a conference in which a group of top American math students described an exchange program they were on, with math students in Russia. Their teacher described a scene in which the younger Russian students dove right into problems that they weren't fully "prepared" for, tackling the hard problems regardless of their preparation. In contrast, the American students skipped over any they didn't feel prepared to answer, and lost focus early in the problems they worked on. "Why?" he asked us, "What's happened? ..Folks, remember - these are our best students.". In coming away from that conference, many of us determined to present math to our students in a way that would nourish that zeal for discovery and preserve the truth about the sweat involved. This web site, is in part an outgrowth of that resolve.
So, we've been getting little sleep and the computer glitches never seem to quit, but ... it's perfect. My mom - coming from that too-familiar background where math is a four letter word - dug into the hard stuff, and stayed with it. Deep, tired smiles all around. Way to go, Mom. Yes, you will learn math here. You already are.
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