March 17, 2025
By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for the audio version of this newsletter.
My daughter Isabel is teaching 4th grade. Last week she sent me a challenge math problem that her students are working on. I must admit it was complicated, but Isabel and I joyfully figured it out together. We asked each other questions, we tried the approach outlined in her curriculum, and we also made up our own route to solve the problem, finding the answer through multiple, winding paths. It was fun, and not unlike our exchanges when we share Wordle scores or nudge each other on Duolingo or go on other intellectual explorations together.
The exchange about the math problem reminded me of mathematical adventures I had with Isabel and her sister Mira when they were young.
I remember waiting in the line at the post office with 8-year-old Mira. I’d told her we needed to buy a book of 20 first-class stamps which, at the time, cost 44¢ each. Mira was not at all interested in taking the easy route and buying a book of 20 Forever stamps. As we stood in line, she explained the many ways we could get the stamps we needed. Mira explained that we could reach 44¢ with:
4 10¢ stamps, plus 4 1¢ stamps
or a 36¢ stamp and 4 2¢ stamps
or 8 5¢ stamps and 4 1¢ stamps
The list of options went on and on (and I still have a drawer full of 1¢ and 2¢ stamps…)
I remember racing to catch the school bus with 6-year-old Isabel who insisted on stopping to admire the ants parading across the sidewalk, even though the school bus was waiting at the end of the street. Isabel joyfully noted that the ants walked in a pattern that formed both straight lines and curves and was at times symmetrical and at other times asymmetrical. (And of course we got to continue that conversation when I drove her to school after missing the bus.)
Many of you will be familiar with the phrase Girl Math, the TikTok trend that…well let’s just say reinforces stereotypes around girls and math. So, this week, in honor of Women’s History Month —and in honor of good teaching every month—I’m offering a new definition of the term Girl Math.
Starting today, Girl Math means seeing the world through curious eyes. It means wondering about how many ways to calculate the right amount of postage on a letter and what the methodical marching patterns of ants can teach us about geometry.
Girl Math is being curious about the contributions of female mathematicians going all the way back to Hypatia, a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher born in 355 CE. It means exploring the discoveries of NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, Professor of mathematics and statistics Dr. Cecilia Diniz Behn, whom we featured in Hooray For Monday in 2023, and Maryam Mirzakhani, whose discoveries in Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry redefined our understanding of the ways objects interact in space. (Think: how lines and shapes intersect in a flat world vs. how they intersect in a curved world/universe…)
Girl Math means knowing that numbers are a tool for understanding, and creating, your world.
In his book Love and Math, Edward Frankel asks,
“What if you had to take an art class in which you were taught only how to paint a fence, but were never shown the paintings of van Gogh or Picasso? Alas, this is how math is taught, and so for most of us it becomes the intellectual equivalent of watching paint dry.”
There is so much more to math than solving equations. And there’s so much more to solving equations than following the procedure outlined in the textbook.
So, this week I’m presenting you with a challenge problem: teach Girl Math to all your students! Teach them to look for numbers, shapes, patterns, and more in their classrooms and homes, on the playground, and everywhere they go.
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Hooray For Monday is an award-winning weekly publication of Center for Inspired Teaching, a social change nonprofit organization that champions the power of curiosity and is dedicated to transforming the school experience from compliance-based to engagement-based. Inspired Teaching provides transformative, improvisation-based professional learning for teachers that is 100% engaging – intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
