Eileen

Yeah, I'd be happy to.

So this amazing teacher, Talania Norfar, had been working with her Algebra II class on exponential growth and quadratic equations.

And she knew that in order to make the learning really relevant for the kids and to make them deeply committed to learning it and deeply engaged with the process of understanding how it applies and what it's for,

That to build that lesson into some kind of civic opportunity to help in the community is deeply motivating to kids.

It both helps them to learn the math and helps them situate the math in a broader life skill and learning opportunity to develop themselves socially too.

And so what she did in her lesson, which is brilliant, is she taught the kids how to calculate quadratic equations, how to use exponential growth.

And then they applied it in a project where they became financial advisors.

to families from their communities who were struggling to figure out how do I pay for my children's college?

How might I purchase a home someday?

How do I organize my finances and think about how I should plan?

And so the kids actually worked between the technical knowledge of the classroom and the more lay person applied ways of explaining things to families in their communities and then helped their family

to figure out how to plan for the future that they wanted.

And when you watch the young people, her students, in this activity, it's just amazing to see the serious demeanor, the engagement, the deep focus they bring

to their math because they know this math is a useful, important way for me to help contribute to my community.

And it's really important that I do it right and that I'm actually putting in in a way that will move other people's lives in a positive direction.

Just that inner sense of satisfaction that comes from

deeply engaging in a job well done that really changed you as a person, that helped you deeply learn in a way that makes you understand your own role differently in the world and integrates, in this case, mathematical thinking into that role, that's enough.

That is what kids live for.

It's what we all live for.

I think this is just an amazing connection you make, Rose, because if you try to think about what is it that actually enables us as human beings to appreciate beauty, to experience an emotion like awe, to wonder, what we're really saying is we are looking for beauty.