"Stanford education professor Jo Boaler’s message about teaching math in visual ways that don’t emphasize one right procedure has become a rallying cry for many math educators ready for a seismic shift in how American schools teach mathematics. But her ideas also challenge much of what has been done in classrooms for decades, including the ways that current teachers and parents learned themselves. Alice Keeler is one of the converted, despite the fact she taught math traditionally for many years.
“I was a math teacher, and I’ll be honest,” Keeler said, “I didn’t teach it to be creative.” She always felt pressure to move more quickly through the curriculum. Every day brought a new topic, whether or not students had deeply understood what came before. When Keeler read Boaler’s book, Mathematical Mindsets, she saw herself as a young student in much of what Boaler described. With tears in her eyes, she told a group of educators at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) that since fourth grade she secretly thought she was dumb because she couldn’t pass timed math tests. Boaler’s message that fast is not the same thing as smart was liberating to her as a person and as a math teacher."
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