“I hate Math.”
It wasn’t exactly the response I was hoping for from a student enrolled in my undergraduate Mathematics course, but it was an honest one.
I pressed a little. What was it about Mathematics that she hated?
Algebra, for one. But there was something else. She didn’t like the idea that in Mathematics there was always a “right” answer. What if, she wondered, she could express her thinking in a way that was different from what was expected?
I understood the question underneath her question: Is there room for me here?
I told her that, at least in our classroom, I wasn’t particularly interested in Mathematics as a race to the right answer. I wanted us to look for Mathematics in the world around us — to notice it, question it, and use it to better understand the things we cared about.
Something shifted.
There was no dramatic conversion in which a lifelong math skeptic suddenly fell in love with Algebra. But over the course of the semester, I watched her become curious. And curiosity, I have learned, is a pretty good place for Mathematics to begin.
Decoding Individuality
In my undergraduate Mathematics course, taught through the lens of social justice, students spend the semester exploring data connected to an issue that matters to them. Inspired by Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi’s book, Dear Data, I designed a project that asks students to do something deceptively simple: spend time with the numbers before deciding what to do with them.
What do you notice? What surprises you? What do you wish you knew? What is this data trying to tell you? And eventually, How can you help someone else see what you see?
For her project, this student chose to explore climate change and its impact on human systems. Her final piece was unlike any graph I could have prescribed. Across a hand-drawn map of the world, she created an intricate visual language of shapes, patterns, colors, and symbols. Each choice communicated something about the data she had studied.
The Mathematics was there. But so was interpretation, creativity, curiosity, and choice.
The student who entered my classroom frustrated by the expectation that there was one right way to express mathematical thinking had created a mathematical representation that could only have been hers.
Her work took me back to a time before I was a professor teaching future educators, when I was a Middle School Mathematics teacher. I remember a seventh grader who decided to collect data about the music she listened to. Over the course of a week, she tracked the artists she listened to, how long she listened, and when she listened. Then she turned her data into a flower.
Each colorful petal became part of a visual system. Patterns represented artists. Symbols communicated listening time. The petals captured different days of her week.
What initially looked like a colorful drawing contained a carefully constructed mathematical language. To understand it, you had to study her legend. You had to decode her thinking.
Her data wasn’t about climate change, housing inequity, or another pressing social issue. It was about her. And that mattered.
Questioning, Showing, and Telling
The sophistication of the data has changed as my students have changed, but the invitation has remained remarkably similar: What do you notice? What do you want to know? How will you show what you see? These are the stories that travel with me throughout my career.
This past year, I had the opportunity to watch that invitation travel once again. As co-principal investigator on a project funded through the Mathematical Association of America’s Neff Middle School Professional Development Initiative, I worked with another Mathematics professor at Salem State University and Middle School Mathematics teachers and coaches from Salem Public Schools.
We worked alongside one another, and that word matters to me.
This wasn’t about university professors arriving with the right answers. We brought different expertise to the table and wrestled together with questions about Mathematics, curriculum, proportional reasoning, data, equity, and the students we serve. Our collaboration eventually culminated in a Math Vacation Academy, when Salem Middle School students found their way to our university campus.
And there, once again, was data.
We didn’t want students simply to make a graph. We wanted them to ask questions about the numbers in front of them. What is this telling you? What isn’t it telling you? What do you want to know? What do you want someone else to notice?
And then we asked them to show us.
I watched young people transform numbers into visual stories, making choices about what should stand out, what needed explanation, and what another person might understand differently because of the way they chose to represent it. Then their work emerged.
Attendance, made visible: the students transformed attendance data across student demographic groups into a tactile visualization, using colored beads to represent rates and differences among groups. The branching strands make disparities visible in a way a traditional graph might not, inviting the viewer to notice where experiences converge and where they begin to separate.
Once again, the work was astoundingly beautiful. The care students put into their visualizations can be extraordinary, but there is also something beautiful about watching a student stop seeing data as numbers to be processed and begin seeing it as a way to understand an experience, a community, or the world.
A percentage can represent children. A ratio can reveal an inequity. An average can conceal huge differences across people’s experiences. A collection of listening times can tell the story of a seventh grader’s week.
Data can make something visible that we might otherwise overlook.
I sometimes think about the student who told me she hated Math. I don’t know that she left my course loving Math. That was never really the goal. But I watched her create a beautiful, complicated mathematical story about climate change and human lives and decide for herself what she wanted other people to notice.
She had found something worth counting.
Always Seeing and Wondering
Years earlier, a seventh grader had found hers in the songs filling her headphones. Years later, Middle School students from Salem would arrive on our university campus and begin looking for theirs.
The questions change. The data becomes more complex. The Mathematics grows with our students.
But I keep returning to the same invitation:
What do you notice? What do you wonder? What do you want someone else to see?
I have spent much of my career teaching students how to work with data. Perhaps one of the most important things they have taught me is that before we tell students how to represent the numbers in front of them, we should occasionally give them the opportunity to decide what is worth noticing in the first place.
Because what we choose to count tells a story. And our students deserve the opportunity to help decide how that story gets told.
