Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

So this is an example of a really fantastic math curriculum that's built by a school in New York City that's an alternative high school for kids who haven't passed their classes in traditional schools for whatever reason.

Some of them are new immigrants to the country.

Some of them have just failed in the past and not connected with school.

Some of them are in trouble.

And so these teachers have designed a math curriculum that turns things on its head, right?

But they actually have it right.

Rather than starting with the building blocks of how to calculate things and working up, they start with big, powerful, intriguing ideas.

They get kids involved with those.

They choose big problems to work on.

And then those problems become the space in which they learn mathematical calculation because they're so driven to understand their problem.

So this one young man is describing how he had never before taken a math class and passed.

And in this math class, he was given a big problem called Zeno's paradox.

It's this problem that he calls walking to the door.

You get halfway, halfway, halfway to the door.

Do you ever make it to the door?

Why or why not?

And he says, I got so fascinated by this problem, I had to learn fractions to solve the problem I had.

And I got fascinated by ideas like asymptotes and finite and infinite.

And he talks about how he's moving back and forth between being fascinated by this big idea and having to learn the calculations and the mathematical concepts to be able to satisfy his curiosity about that big idea.

And as he is, we think, tilting his brain sort of back and forth from paying attention, learning about fractions because I care about big ideas like infinity.