Weekly Questions: What is mathematics? What’s the relationship between equitable mathematics learning and why some students struggle in mathematics?
Essential Question: What does equitable, justice-oriented, and/or anti-racist mathematics learning look like? Something I have learned during my time in college is that mathematics does not have a clear definition. It's this thing that we have created -- or maybe we haven't, maybe we discovered it -- that helps explain the world around us. We choose to represent it with these weird symbols like numbers and multiplication signs and sometimes it all makes sense but sometimes we can't prove why it works at all. A TikTok went viral recently of a teenage girl grappling with why math came to be and whether or not it is "real." The internet absolutely tore her apart, calling her stupid and dumb and all kinds of terrible things because she had the audacity to question this thing that she is being forced to learn -- questions that the foremost mathematics scholars ask themselves as well. This points to larger systemic issues of the way we treat and view young girls and ask