When a designer teaches math

When I was offered to teach math in the Berkeley Math Circle this Spring I took up the challenge.

How did I dare?

I love teaching and felt confident that my math school and science degree gave me enough math for young students. My major concern was how will I teach three interactive sessions in a row having 30 kids in a class. And though I worked with grade school students in the past I've never taught six year olds.

"Trust the process" is my mantra and so I dove into preparation. I took consultation from a professional actor on how to work with your body to save voice after three hours of teaching. My other friend, a kids' psychologist, shared his wisdom on how to deal with kids who constantly raise their hand and tend to grab all attention. And I studied the course curriculum itself.

Assumptions proved to be wrong

Math happened to be the biggest challenge in this project. In Berkeley Math Circle kids study math that is never discussed at any school grade (like pigeonhole principle). I realized that some problems I could solve only by writing equations or using multiplication (first graders don't know how to multiply). And I started panicking.

Beginner's mindset

If you ask what helped me to succeed, it's the beginner's mindset. It saved me in the past when I designed the user interface to configure network switches. And it helped me with teaching math in the math circle.

Preparing for the class I tried to look at each math problem from a six year old child perspective and asked questions they might have. Fortunately I have friends and family to help with math. Believe me, each problem took more than 5 whys.

I deliberately didn't use any shortcuts or artificial intelligence to figure out the solution. Otherwise, how would I empathize with kids' way of thinking?

Ambiguity

Even teaching graduate students you never know how they will surprise you at the next session. With elementary school kids it's even more unpredictable. Sometimes I oversimplified the explanation and someone would get bored, sometimes it took two sessions until the idea finally clicks. Another day the whole class felt under the weather and kids stretched on the tables as soon as they entered the auditorium. And every time I had to come up with a new way to grab their attention at the beginning of the class, otherwise they would just pretend to be present.

Sparks

We introduced binary system topic with "ladybugs" problems. Solving them myself I kept forgetting which character does what and decided to draw them. Inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe, my ladybugs' portraits were huge (25" x 30"). We used these posters across multiple sessions and kids empathized with Anny's and Betty's struggles to count the flowers.

When I sketched pigeons on post-it notes to explain the pigeonhole (Dirichlet) principle, kids got excited seeing ice-cream cones in my scribbles and called them “ice-cream cone pigeons”. They laughed when I drew stick people on the black board, enjoyed small talk about squirrels before solving the "squirrels' problem", and drew little mice, square tables and chains of circles themselves.

All these little moments and artifacts gave them excitement and helped us enter the flow and fun of doing math.

With all preparations you never know what will spark kids' reaction. At one session we had a problem about an Oxford dictionary. A student who had never participated in our class discussions before, suddenly exclaimed in surprise - "oh, we have this book at home". That was a trigger. Once the emotional connection happened he actively participated in every session.

Building on ideas of others

Kids raised their hands eager to show how they solved the homework problem. You could see that parents did their homework too.

When I gave unfamiliar problem in the class, students were initially hesitant and puzzled. With little hint, there would be someone who would make an attempt to solve the problem. Even when the first guess is wrong it breaks the silence and kids interrupting each other start "ideating" and proposing their solutions. I borrowed this method from my design facilitation practice and can't stop admiring the magic it makes with students. As one of the parents put in the feedback form, the biggest influence math circle had on their child was “being in the presence of confident peers that can courageously speak up about the math question being posed”.

Recap

My goal was to help kids develop mathematical thinking. Knowing how difficult it is, I praised every attempt to solve the problem even when it wasn't the correct one. Over the course of the semester I could see students' progress and growing confidence from doing the exercises, hearing their peers and explaining their own solutions at the board.

As another parent wrote about his child: “It was great to see him starting to answer questions in class”.

I was happy to see that kids felt rewarded for being creative studying math. It took a lot of effort to design this learning experience and I'm really proud of the result.

Many thanks to Laura Givental for her confidence in me and support during this journey!