Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math
By Shalinee Sharma
Recommended on: 3rd March 2024
Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math, by Shalinee Sharma. This is a brilliant book—hands down the most engaging and best-researched book on learning math we’ve ever encountered. These paragraphs give a sense of Sharma’s ability to step back and help us see the big picture of what’s going on when teaching and learning about math:
“Math education isn’t often discussed from an integrative complexity perspective, with requisite speed and fluency counterbalanced by a slower, more creative and collaborative approach. Both-and, not either-or. The problem can be traced back to the math wars, a phrase coined in the 1990s but a battle that has been fought in schools for at least fifty years. At the time of this writing, I am nervous that the math wars may be revving up again. This should worry us all. The only casualties are the students.
“The math wars are more like World War I than World War II. In World War II, the narrative is about the good guys and the bad guys, the Allies (i.e., democracies) and the Axis (i.e., Nazis). Trying to parse WWI, meanwhile, is much trickier. The common explanation is that a series of treaties created a domino effect engulfing multiple continents in war. The dominos began falling due to the assassination of an archduke. In the end, forty million people died. Similarly, the math wars are complex without easily identifiable good guys and bad guys. In fact, it is often not clear to many educators or STEM workers, like my team of software engineers and technologists, what the math wars are about: The issues ebb and flow with the political tides. Further, the math wars morph as social media celebrities seek Likes, and factions come together and dissolve. As it pertains to speed and math, the wars are quite simple: One side overemphasizes it and the other side underemphasizes it.
“The research doesn’t declare a clear winner in the battle over speed. The problem is that neither side is willing to acknowledge the integrative complexity that the research offers and strike the proper balance.”
The nonprofit learning platform, Zearn Math, that Sharma has co-created and led, has been deemed one of the most important and innovative educational platforms in the US. Under Sharma’s leadership, Zearn Math has developed a ground-breaking approach to teaching and learning math, including interactive videos with onscreen teachers and digital manipulatives with just-in-time feedback. In print, physical manipulatives and the digital sphere, Zearn utilizes the proven pedagogy of concrete to pictorial to abstract as well as a balance of fluency, conceptual understanding and application work used in the highest performing PISA countries. Zearn’s technology is focused on supporting students to understand grade-level work through acceleration, starting students off with grade-level work and offering personalized, brief, just-in-time supports when students struggle, rather than the dominant approach of remediation, taking students off grade-level work for extended periods of time. In fact, Zearn demonstrated using a fixed-effect model that acceleration was superior to remediation.
Learn all about great approaches to learning and teaching math in this brilliant book that opens the doors to the future of math education.
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