Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

What an amazing idea.

An asymptote.

that you get closer and closer to something, but you never reach it, right?

As he's doing that, he's tickling up, we think, the same regions of his brain that are the ones that are the kind of pivot of the attentional seesaw, which are the feeling of your guts and viscera in your own self.

And what we think is happening is that by engaging in these

in these agentic ways of moving yourself between doing the skill and thinking about the big idea and then doing the calculations again because you care about the big idea, what happens is that the after effect is you activate up these regions of the brain that are the seat of our subjective feeling of our own internal self.

They're the feeling of being me.

And the kid says, and many of the kids in this kind of curriculum say, it got relevant to my life.

It mattered to my life.

You've never passed a math class before.

You're a new immigrant to the United States living in poverty and infinity got relevant to your life and fractions because relevance is not necessarily simply about the direct applicability of a skill to your everyday things you need to accomplish.

That's important, but that's relevance with what I would call a little r.

Relevance with a big R is it feels like me to think about and understand this big, powerful idea.

I'm moving through the world with a level of understanding and analysis that I didn't have before.

That feels powerful.

And when you do that, the math becomes relevant to who I am.

So we set the cart before the horse in the way we design our curricula right now.

We're thinking too much about what little learning nuggets get shoved in the cart.

And we forget to think about who's the horse pulling that cart?

What does that horse need?