Feeding your soul, and your face

There is nothing about baking that is not math-adjacent. You got your areas, your volumes, your word problems, unit conversion, scaling, measurement, timing, fractions, and a whole bunch of other activities that would make for an engaging, all-ages action and communication math extravaganza.

Plus, you get cookies when you’re done. Sooooo, maybe get on this?

Frequency x Severity

In my other job, we were assessing some large-scale changes this week, and it reinforced for me how difficult it is as humans to think about the fact that any risk is made up of two components — how bad a particular outcome might be, and how likely it is.

As humans, severity is all that matters, and in a way, it’s all that should — it doesn’t matter if a bad thing is unlikely if it’s sufficiently bad, and if it actually happens to you. Planes basically never go down, but if yours does, their reliability is of no comfort at all.

Of course, that’s not the whole story: frequency is exactly as important — they both get equal standing in the ‘sigma p(x)*x’ calculation. Which does kind of go to show that the application of the math is just as important as the math itself.

The worst and most common kind of math hubris is the kind that says, ‘the facts don’t care about your feelings’. In actual reality, empathetic people, and math experts know that the only thing that matters are the feelings, and our job is to align them as much as possible with the reality of the facts in order to allow people to be informed, empowered participants in choosing their own direction.

From the perspective of math learning, then, if you want people to be motivated and engaged, you can tell them ‘It’s just math, it’s important because it’s true, and you can feel any way you want about that but you still have to do it.’ I wish you all the luck in the world with that; you’re going to need it. The easier, simpler, I’d say better way is to help people understand what it has to do with them, and build your case for their engagement on that basis.

Why your shirts don’t fit

If you're a human man and you wear shirts (an intersection of descriptors that I suspect describes about half of you), you may have noted that the armholes are often kind of big. "Huh," you may have said. "These armholes -- they're big."

The reason that this is the case is that our bodies are all shaped differently, and for a given neck measurement and sleeve length, arms are located at different heights and of different circumferences. In order to make the shirt fit as many people as possible, manufacturers simply make the armholes bigger. As a result, they fit some people perfectly, and they fit most people OK. But they never look quite as good as if the shirt were made just for you -- there's extra fabric hanging there under your arms, and the proportions are functional, but not necessarily flattering.

Math instruction is the same way: schools need to teach a lot of students, and they need to do it efficiently in terms of dollars-per-student. Everyone uses the same book, and sits in the same classroom, listening to the same teacher and doing the same practice problems regardless of whether those things are connecting to them, in particular, as learners.

(For what it's worth, this non-personalization is exacerbated if you're in a state like Maine. Because textbook publishers are also making their armholes too big, they are much more concerned with fitting to the standards established by large states like Texas and Florida than they are with meeting the needs of lower-population markets.)

(If you're saying, 'How much can that possibly matter -- math is math!', I have suspicions about how well your shirts fit.)

This is one reason that many people can struggle with math: because the approaches they're presented with aren't directed at them, they're directed at the most people possible -- but that group isn't even that large, and anyway, who cares how many people an approach does work for if it doesn't work for you?

The world is full of people, and schools full of learners, who think they're not good at math when really, they just need a shirt that fits slightly differently than the one that they were handed as part of the uniform. This isn't something they did, and it's honestly a terrible shame because of how enjoyable and how useful many of these topics are.