March 10, 2025
By Jenna Fournel, Director of Teaching and Learning
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for the audio version of this newsletter.
Few things are as ubiquitous in our memories of school as memorizing the number behind pi.
For some of us, we went beyond 3.14. But for most of us knowing 3.14 was sufficient to fake our way through geometry – a class whose content most of us said we would never again need to know in our lives. Looking at it in a different way, geometry is about discovering truths. And that has meaningful implications.
I’m thinking about this because this week we celebrate a day that is as much an excuse to eat dessert as it is a celebration of that enigmatic number. Pi Day has become a celebrated event in schools. In some places children might go beyond eating and drawing circles. They might engage in activities like this one that our staff recently undertook to learn why 3.14 equals pi.
Even if you’re not going to become a designer of circular things, why matters. Because if we only learn pi as a number that can be plugged into equations to find the radius and diameter of a circle, we’re missing something really interesting and curiosity-producing. When we relegate pi (and other aspects of math) to rote learning, we miss the opportunity to learn that there are some things in our world that are universally true. Deriving pi through our own experiments sparks curiosity. It makes us wonder: “If that’s true, what else might be true?”
And looking under the hood to understand why makes us active participants in finding truth, rather than passive recipients of the “truths” that someone else provides us.
I thought of this while reading New York Times reporting on the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) claims that their cuts to government agencies are saving the government money. Reporters have been looking into DOGE’s numbers and found that many, if not most, of them are baseless. They reflect savings on contracts canceled long ago, errors in cutting and pasting of figures, and a general lack of understanding of how government contracts work in the first place.
Would these errors have been made if the people behind them had learned where 3.14 really comes from? Maybe not. But every time we question the why behind a given, we grow our curiosity, and our understanding. And with that knowledge, we become better at investigating unknowns instead of simply taking them at face value.
So by all means, make the pies on March 14. And then, invite students to measure the diameter and circumference of the dish before it gets cut up. And then see what they discover about the constant, pi. Few things in life are certain; there might be some comfort in finding something that is.
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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.
