Haimo Award Acceptance Talk

Children love mathematics. Spend time in an elementary classroom and you will see students eager to ask questions and solve problems. Somewhere between that classroom and college, something changes. Students who once approached mathematics with curiosity begin to approach it with caution. After twelve years of teaching, I keep meeting the same student. Mathematics has stopped being something she does and become something that happens to her. What she has lost is not confidence or skill. She has lost the belief that she is someone who can do mathematics. This talk follows that student's trajectory and describes what a classroom looks like when it is designed to address that loss. The practices I draw on matter not as innovations in themselves, but as responses to a single problem. They return to students the belief that mathematics is something they can do. The talk ends where the problem begins, with a student who once believed she was not meant to do mathematics, and with what she is doing now.