Monica’s Math Classroom : Playground of Light

Somewhere in a classroom, a math teacher asks her student to abandon the textbook and takes her to join a game of cricket outside. She leads another to a kitchen full of ingredients and hands the baffled child a recipe, while a third student is tasked with interviewing an insurance agent. One of her students screams “I hate math!” and pouts, little hands folded tightly to the front, to which the teacher says, “It’s ok, you’re still welcome to my class.”

This is the math classroom of Monica Kochar, Fellow - Learning Design for Create with Math at WhiteHat Jr. From an ode to acute angles to a colorful illustration of “Mr. Fear”, a curved number line to a cube fashioned from the morning’s newspaper, you will find activities in Monica’s class usually not prescribed in the curriculum. And everyone is welcome here—whether you’re a poet and think you have little to do with math, or an aspiring data scientist, you can have a seat.

And once you have a seat, you must be prepared to do whatever it takes to learn math, even abandon the textbook. If you wonder why we might have a clue for you.

Maslow Before Bloom

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs perhaps calls for no introduction, and educators around the world are familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy, a framework with wide applications in the field. Maslow Before Bloom, we are told, is the foundational idea that children must first have their basic needs for connection and acknowledgment met before they can start learning.

In other words, if a student is hungry, tired, or feels like a failure, give them a cookie, a nap, or a hug first. If they sulk in the math class but love music, try letting them play music before giving them a quadratic equation.

Monica, no stranger to the idea, sets aside the conventional to focus on something far more important: making the child feel secure. It is no easy task, for it takes commitment, kindness, and creativity to establish this trust. A commitment to observe the child and “catch the tides,” as she puts it, of the child’s mental wellbeing. A sort of kindness in which preconceived notions or old beliefs are rejected in favour of “seeing the child with a fresh pair of eyes”. And a kind of creativity to explore new paths of learning with the child, even at the risk of failure. In this context, the learning outcome depends on the teacher as it does on the child.

Beginners’ Bootcamp

Little did Monica know that time had come for her to level up to the 10x impact of her bold idea sometime in 2020, when she met the core team at WhiteHat Jr. Reluctant to respond to the call at first, she wondered if the “simple math teacher” that she considered herself could belong with an EdTech brand.

One fateful day, Monica joined kindred spirits as part of the team that Balaji Ramanujam, Chief Learning Officer at WhiteHat Jr, had handpicked to develop the math curriculum. "We called ourselves BBB—Balaji's Bootcamp Buddies," she says.

And it wasn’t without its share of uncertainties and moments of self-doubt. She often wondered what she was doing there when Balaji would reply, "You are a part of Create with Math. That is what you are doing here."

Together, the BBB tribe stepped into the child’s shoes to fuel their innate sense of wonder. Lessons were presented as stories and quests, and plots and characters were introduced. A team of passionate illustrators joined the mission to breathe life into them, creating a rich world of unforgettable friends like Nutsy the Nut Collector and Mr. Turtleneck of the Jellyfish Jungle.

And just as artists created a muse for every child, curriculum designers made sure there was a lesson for everyone too, from the not-so-fond of math to the lovers of the subject. This inclusivity was powered by teachers who provided in-class observations, although they weren’t the only observers. Watching over hundreds of classes as invisible participants were tech leaders, the architects of the virtual classroom, who brought the human experience to the heart of this digital adventure.

The Journey Ahead

So far, this has been as much a story of the power of Maslow Before Bloom as it has been of making it accessible to children around the world, with all the goodness of the student-teacher bond intact. Over 30,440 children worldwide and 4,410 Indian women teachers have Created together with Math so far at WhiteHat Jr.

Together, we bring students and teachers to Monica's Math Classroom, and we aspire to bring many more. Because here, Math is welcomed and appreciated and anxiety has no power. At Create with Math, fear is named, colored, transformed, and overcome.

To each student on a quest to become math confident, we present Monica’s resounding words, “You know dear, you are not just doing math. You are facing your fear. Isn’t that awesome?”