Math Therapy

S2E08: Mathematicians: they’re just like us! w/ Sunil Singh

July 23, 2020 The Math Guru Season 2 Episode 8
Math Therapy
S2E08: Mathematicians: they’re just like us! w/ Sunil Singh
Show Notes Transcript

Ever wonder what it would be like if your math teacher was like, the editor of TMZ and like, if your textbook was filled with juicy goss about all of those seemingly-boring-actually-scandalous mathematicians that plagued your high school existence? Today Vanessa talks to Sunil Singh about how different our relationship to math would be if we humanized mathematics through storytelling, and - he spills the TEA, bigtime!

About Sunil

Sunil Singh was a high school math and physics teacher for 19 years and has taught every grade level in places from Canada to Switzerland.  He is the author of Pi of Life: The Hidden Happiness of Mathematics and Math Recess: Playful Learning in an Age of Disruption. He is also a co-editor at Q.E.D., a very popular blog for "disruptive" math writing, and was also a regular writer for The New York Times Numberplay section.

Follow Sunil on Twitter @Mathgarden

Today’s show notes & links: themathguru.ca/maththerapy/sunilsingh

Reach Vanessa on all socials: @themathguru

Show intro: Hi, I’m Vanessa Vakharia aka The Math Guru, and you're listening to Math Therapy - a podcast that helps guests work through their math traumas, one problem at a time. When I was in grade 11, I failed math not once, but twice because I was told that I just wasn't a math person. Thanks to a math intervention in the form of an amazing teacher, I ended up scoring 99% in grade 12 math, and now I run The Math Guru, my very own math tutoring studio in Toronto. I started Math Therapy to take this conversation global and I like to think of it as not just a podcast but a movement. Whether you think you're a math person or not, you're about to find out that math people don't actually exist, but the scars that math class left on many of us definitely do. Oh, and don't worry - no calculators or actual math were involved in the making of this podcast.

Episode intro: Okay guys, welcome to Math Therapy! I’m blubbering with excitement right now because this episode turned out to be basically the biggest gossip session ever but about mathematicians. This week I have Sunil Singh on the podcast, an ex highschool math and physics teacher who has taught every grade level in multiple crazy places from Canada all the way to Switzerland, and yeah, I said ex because he quit his teaching job recently because he loved it too much, something we’ll dig into in our interview. He is the author of Pi of Life: the Hidden Happiness of Mathematics and Math Recess: Playful Learning in an Age of Disruption. He calls himself a math education disruptor which I find totally accurate and totally badass, okay but the coolest thing about Sunil is that he is obsessed with humanizing mathematics and by proxy, humanizing mathematicians. He’s as obsessed with the secret life of Einstein as I am with the secret life of Kim Kardashian so to my delight, this interview totally turned out to be a TMZ style interview, I’m not even kidding. Sunil seriously spills the tea on the mathematical icons that have plagued our math classrooms for as long as we can remember. Wait until you hear the dirt on Pascal, like Pascal’s triangle Pascal - that Pascal. That guy was whack, let me tell you. Okay, don’t want to give too much away so let’s get into it.

Vanessa Vakharia: Hi!

Sunil Singh: Hi!

V: Welcome to the podcast.

S: Thanks Vanessa. How are you?

V: Good. This is really interesting because ever since we’ve met, we’ve had this similarity in that we believe that school is actually really killing any potential joy or inspiration that could be found in math.

S: Just because I’m going to forget… There’s an article that I think came through my LinkedIn, that people who quit companies, I’m sure it applies to teaching as well, people who quit their job at a company are sometimes the ones that love their job and company the most.

V: And what’s the reason?

S: Well because they are so dissatisfied with what's happening, that they’re not disinterested these people, they're so passionate, they're seeing something that they are a part of just burn to the ground. They go, I’m out of here.

V: And so this is interesting too, because this is the difference between… I think for the both of us, I don’t know if you know this but I taught in a classroom for a month, it was during my practice teaching, but that month I was like, I can’t work within this system, I need to work outside of it. I think that’s kind of what we're both doing in a way.

S: Yeah I was kind of slow, it took me 19 years.

V: (Laughing)

S: Well I had some really good moments but that’s pretty brave.

V: I was a horrible disciplinarian so I couldn't even last the month. I couldn't yell at people, people were walking all over me and I just knew, both of us are disruptive, I knew I couldn’t say or do what I wanted to do with that classroom.

S: Well what’s interesting, if someone says, “Hang your hat on your greatest accomplishment as a teacher”, someone would ask me, some might go, it was when you were teaching in Switzerland or you took middle school students to an International European contest, British school of Paris, they might think it’s math related. But the number one thing I can hang my hat on, and I taught in Regent Park for 3, 4 years, my last 2 years were at Ajax High, I taught some pretty challenging kids who came from challenging socioeconomic backgrounds. Not once in my entire career did I send a kid to the office. 

V: Okay that’s actually insane.

S: I came close in my last year. There was a kid named Luke, it was in a grade 11 class, not that class that day, but it was in that class. He was swearing and stuff. Usually if the emotional and physical safety of the classroom’s in danger, that’s when I would intervene. So he wasn’t swearing at anybody yet, he was swearing to himself, he was mad, but then it started to get out of hand. He pushed his desk. I tried to disarm…

V: Was he mad about math?

S: He was mad about other things. He’s escalating and he's trying to push my buttons. I go, “Luke, can you please have a seat or can we just talk outside?” and he goes, “Fuck off”. He says it to me so the kids are looking at me to see my response, and again I'm still trying to disarm it and be calm and I go, “Luke, you can’t talk to me like that, is there an issue or a problem?”. Again he's pushing the desk, and he’s like, “Fuck this”.

V: I love how I tell you you can swear on the podcast and you’re like okay I’m going to reenact this entire story.

S: It’s my student though… And then, I shifted gears. I did raise my voice. The kids knew I never raised my voice. So I raised my voice and I took $10 out of my pocket, I go, “Luke. here’s 10 fucking dollars…

V: (Gasps)

S: ...Go get yourself something to eat and don't come back.”. 

V: What happened? I’m so freaked out by you right now, this is scary when you raise your voice.

S: Well it’s because he wasn't expecting the yelling and also for me to give him 10 bucks, he was expecting to be kicked out of the classroom. So I go, “You go for a long walk”, I couldn’t say go to Tim Horton’s but go for a long walk, get something to eat, come back. He took the 10$ and long story short he was one of the three kids who bought me a bottle of wine at the end of the year. 

V: Did he go for the walk?

S: Yeah he did, yeah. I don't think he passed, he was too far behind because he had a lot of other issues.

V: But he was grateful for that.

S: He was grateful. He said, “You’re one of the few teachers or adults who cared.”.

V: Where is he now? I always am obsessed with these stories. Do we know where Luke is?

S: Well I'm sure I can find it because a lot of teachers…

V: Please find out so we can follow up on this.

S: I’ll definitely follow up.

V: Okay this is amazing. I want to talk about this for a second. So the whole reason you’re quitting is because one thing I love about you is you are very passionate about the fact that math should be treated like recess. We should be focussing on the storytelling aspect, the wellness aspect, and focusing on the fact that failure is not just something that happens in math class, it is math class. Right?

S: Absolutely.

V: Tell me what this phrase you have called, “math wellness” means. I love the idea of math wellness.

S: It’s probably the opposite of math success because when we use success, it is used with good intentions in our vocabulary in schools, we want kids to be successful. 

V: But what does that mean?

S: Exactly but what I think it means, it’s really saying to be successful you have to have a good job, you have to earn a good income. Again, well intentioned, but it’s always through this sort of economic, financial lens of success. That's what they're trying to say is that you need math for careers and all those things. Let's cut to the chase, let’s everyone get perfect scores, let’s everyone who graduates high school and other courses in math get 100% - now what? Okay, you’ve arrived. What does that mean? How is that going to help society? The math they’ve learned is more about how they can help themselves than others. The idea of wellness to me is, I’m going to be using this Neil Peart quote, it’s from the song Prime Mover and the lyric goes, from the first ignition to the final drive, the goal of the journey is not to arrive.

V: I love it.

S: If that’s what he was talking about, life, then learning math is a subset of that and that should apply too.

V: So the idea is that we should be more focussed on the process.

S: We should be focussed on the moment. The best part of math lies between the question and the answer.

V: So that meditative state when you’re present in a problem.

S: Present and I’ll even take it one step further, because you mentioned failure, one of the gifts of mathematics is, and I think very few other subjects and disciplines do this. When you read something potent, you stop, you go, “Wow, that was a heavy lyric”, or if you’re listening to a song, you might stop it. Well math stops us so many times in a problem where if it’s a really good problem you get stumped, and your brain starts to slow down because you’ve exhausted all your possibilities but you’re still staring at the problem in this sort of melancholy stillness. You’re just staring at it.

V: Because you’re stuck.

S: You’re stuck but you’re not moving away, and from a health point of view in this busy, fast paced world we live in, that’s such a good thing to be, to be stuck and stop.

V: The way you're talking about this is giving me goosebumps, but what is so crazy to me is this could not be more opposite to the way it’s treated.

S: Absolutely. One of my mentors, Peter Taylor who is a professor at Queen’s, still teaching there I think he's in his early 80s, he teaches a course at Queen's University called poetry in math where he actually compares lines of poetry to lines of mathematical solutions and proofs, in terms of the similarities are of thinking. He said something which is a stroke of genius, he says if you take an english course, an english course books are chosen first, what books should we read, what poems should we read, and then the curriculum is written around that. In math we write the curriculum first and then write the books. He’s saying, where are the math poems, where are the math problems which anchor a course. 

We always think that math anxiety comes before alienation. He says alienation comes before anxiety because first as a student you go, that’s not for me, I don’t really get it, I don’t like it. Once you start to alienate yourself and distance yourself from math, you start to miss some of the concepts you need and then you realize oh my god I’m not getting it.

V: Well that doesn’t surprise me at all because I feel like I deeply believe that most of the population is alienated by math from the very beginning. Our social structures, by parents, by teachers, there is definitely the sense of coming into the world airing on the side of I’m not going to be able to do it, and this isn’t my thing. 

S: The thing is though, in our society, it’s almost like with doctors we don’t do preventive medicine. When we focus on math anxiety, it’s too late. 

V: The key is how do prevent these math traumas from happening? The way to soak into wellness is self care, we always talk about that. Your style of teaching technically is self care for math. Allowing ourselves to be present in problems, seeing the larger context, looking at it as storytelling, welcoming failure as the process. We talk about how a lot of teachers themselves have anxiety around math.

S: Absolutely.

V: But you going into it, that’s what differentiates you, if a teacher is going to go into it like, yeah, I might make a mistake and we’re making it together, the kids get the idea that making a mistake is fine. However, if a teacher is like, I might make a mistake and I'm going to freak out about it, you get the idea that making a mistake is a bad thing.

S: Have you seen Dan Finkel’s Ted Talk video about 5 extraordinary principles of teaching mathematics?

V: No but should I? I’ll write it down.

S: It’s the number one watched Ted Talk about math now. It has like half a million views.

V: Why?

S: It’s actually on the general TedX website now. He wrote the foreword for Math Recess but when he goes through his 5 principles, number 3 to me is the most important, it’s right in the middle. To me it is the one if I only have 10 seconds to say what the 5 principles are, number 3. He’s telling this to the teachers. You are not the answer key. Your job is not to have the answer. Implicitly, your job is to find the answer.

V: Right, I love that.

S: Whether you do or not is almost immaterial, the fact that you become a mutual learner with your students, you want to find it, so many teachers, especially elementary teachers, feel like they have to know the answer and if they don’t they will get a bad evaluation.

V: Well true but so much of that comes from the way they were also raised. It is so entrenched. I really believe that most people’s math traumas are surrounding the fear of failure. If you really dig deep, I’m sure you have met people who are like, oh my god I’m not a math person, a term that this podcast does not approve of, you’ve met those people. The vibe is always the same. They were taught at some point in life that they could not do math. That they weren’t capable of it or they were made to feel ashamed for making a mistake. Do you find that?

S: Absolutely. It all comes down to if I get it wrong, then I’m not the math person. Again, we talked about it earlier, the irony is math has all been about failure. You know it took over 350 years to solve Fermat's Last Theorem and some of the best mathematicians over the course of the late sixteen hundreds all the way to when Andrew Wiles solved it in 1993, do you think they went in thinking, if I don't solve it, my life is a waste? They were so engrossed by the problem, just to be a part of it and failure after failure… Let’s say if we could somehow watch a fast video of everyone who’s ever taken math from the beginning of time and we watched every problem they did. I would say 80%, 90% ended in failure. But this is before school. People have been transfixed by mathematics because of the failure.

V: So you know a lot about storytelling and history right? I want to talk about that next because you were talking about how you would be doing some work with bringing history into math class but I actually have a question. We were talking about this before, about how people intrinsically enjoy doing math just like they enjoy playing music, or making art or just having casual conversation. There was a point in time where people were doing math for enjoyment until school came along. Do you know the history of that? Was there a point where this stopped?

S: What stopped?

V: The enjoyment. Was it really when school started, math became something mandatory, obviously you weren’t alive back then, but before school existed, were people casually talking about math and not freaked out by it the way that now when you bring up math, people are like ew, numbers. 

S: The Greeks, when they were thinking about mathematics, they were doing more self-enjoyment, personal illumination philosophy.

V: Majority of Greeks or just a few?


S: No I would say basically whoever dabbled in mathematics around that time.

V: Would kids just be hanging out talking about math?

S: I don’t know if we have the actual reporting of the kids themselves but we have stories about the adults. It became a practical thing around the time of Islamic scholars, like Omar Khayyam, Alkarismi, because of inheritance and land transfer, and division of all these things, that's when they saw the practical aspects of algebra. 

V: What were they talking about before?

S: Geometry, visual things. In terms of the abstract ideas of algebra and number theory that came later on, but those, especially algebra because there’s so much discussion about getting rid of algebra in the United States because who needs it, it ironically came from practical purposes in terms of generalizing arithmetic thinking so we could solve these larger problems instead of doing them one by one.

V: Was it due to consumerism?

S: Yeah the trades.

V: Did you read Sapiens? It’s so boring but I feel like you’d love it though. It’s such a good book it’s just…

S: You found it boring but you think I’d like it? You’re saying I’m boring!

V: No! I just mean you're a more academic reader than I am. I really need some short 5 page chapters, but the point is the whole thing is he’s talking about how math starts getting used to keep tallies and land transfers, stuff like that. I’m wondering since you know more about history than I do, is that when it became practical? Because of business?

S: Fibonacci, he was really the person who gave Europe and the West this idea of practical purposes for mathematics.

V: Really? Fibonacci started this all? What year was this? When approximately?

S: This is like 11th, 12th century.

V: A long time ago.

S: Because he was also around trades in terms of the Middle East, so the transference of knowledge from the East to the Middle East, to the West, he was right there. That's why his book Liber Abaci is seen by many people as one of the greatest books ever written because it really introduced the idea of the Western economy or the way to think about it. 

V: Okay so once this happened, oh my god I’m kind of loving this history lesson, okay so this happens, and is it like, now that it’s practical we have to teach people? And is this where it falls apart?

S: I don’t think schools actually started education til probably the 17th century or something like that.

V: Is that when it fell apart? When did people start hating math?

S: I would say people started hating math, I’m going to say because I collect textbooks so I…

V: Of course you do. This is what I mean by why you’d like Sapiens.

S: I collect textbooks to read the forewords because if you want to see the decline of mathematics, read the forewords.

V: Really?

S: Because the forewords in the 50s, 60s, 70s, are far more romantic and the forewords which are written in textbooks now are about you can get a STEM career.

V: Oh my god! That’s actually fascinating, you’re right. Before they were probably all beautiful and poetic.

S: You can become all that! Which is great but it’s not the point. Even in the early 30s, the math education being constructed in the United States, there’s actually a research article written about this, they wanted mathematics for an informed citizenry for democracy. The more math you know, the more you’re going to be able to figure out the facts and truths about life. But what I would argue though is also that people go, “I love math” or “I don’t like math”, would you ever say, “I like food”? There’s different kinds of food you like.

V: Exactly!

S: Not every kind of math I like. 

V: I don’t like geometry very much, actually, personally.

S: There’s 2 weeks in grade 12 advanced functions, sorry we are talking about the very specific Ontario curriculum here, where it’s 2 weeks of trigonometry. You couldn’t pay me enough to tutor people that.

V: You hate it?

S: I was tutoring some kids and I told them there’s a chance I might be sick during the trigonometry.

V: That’s what all my students say to me. 

S: And I go, “We’re going to teach it. I’m going to do my best but I’m going to be so honest with you right now, I absolutely hate this 2 weeks.”. 

V: That’s actually a really good point. There’s so many different things in math that you could like or not like. Wait hold on, this is too exciting. Back up though. When did people start hating math? You were about to say.

S: I would say the actual hating... I want to get a bit serious now, not that we haven’t been serious but I'm going to get pretty serious here, is that this time period, probably the last five years, has the highest incidence of mental health anxiety issues among students.

V: The past 5 years, now?

S: The past 5 years, just generally.

V: I completely agree.

S: So I'm going to be in this film called The Gatekeeper: Math Crisis in America and so I had a chance to talk to the director, Vicki Abeles, before and after the interview and she was a lawyer in New York and she worked at Goldman Sachs, didn’t have a film career but... I hope I get the story straight and I think I will, one of her best friends had a daughter in 6th grade and she failed her algebra test and she killed herself.

V: (Gasps)

S: She immediately almost dropped her career and directed her first film called Race to Nowhere. We're talking about math wellness and my kids love math and I love math so the same thing that I love, has caused a child who should’ve been super happy, so much stress that they ended their life. The gulf between those two is a different universe.

V: That’s horrible.

S: It is horrible. 

V: It’s interesting because I know we haven’t nailed in a date where people started hating math but that to me points to the fact that it’s not math, it’s the pressure we’re putting on what math is supposed to do and how we are supposed to be consuming it. 

S: When I was a student I’m sure people hated math but it was almost comical, like they weren't stressed out.

V: Sure, it’s true they weren’t stressed out about it but now the gulf between those two is huge, but there is still a big gulf between “Oh hahaha I never liked math” and this beautiful poetry, philosophical land where people were really enjoying problems. So I guess what I'm just getting at and this does bring up a dramatic shift, and I completely agree in the past 5 years, it’s not just “I can’t do math”, it’s “I can’t do math and I don't know what to do with my life” - it leads to mental health issues. I’ve seen that a lot but I honestly think that math is one thing but it is a byproduct of how we view success as a whole.

S: There’s a lot of spinning plates here. If I was to ask you - how many minutes a day do you think kids in North America spend in unsupervised outdoor play a day now?

V: Like, none. Zero. I would say zero, literally.

S: It’s about 4 minutes. 4 to 5 minutes a day.

V: I was close if we’re rounding down.

S: Yeah if we’re rounding down. Now when I was a kid, we’d measure this in hours. 

V: Of course.

S: So even my own son, I’m digressing a bit here but it’s really salient, he doesn’t have the luxuries at 13 years old, that when he's playing video games or whatever, he doesn't have the privacy to swear. When I was a kid we went to the park or whatever, we hung out with our friends, and we tried stupid shit and got into trouble, fell down. The proverbial nicks and scrapes and bruises of life. These kids are always surrounded by adults! Even well intentioned adults as parents, after he comes home, I stopped doing this now, I’d ask him how was your day at school? The last thing he needs is one more adult chiming in about his school day. I don’t even talk to him about school, I just let him go play his video games, we don’t even talk about it unless he wants to talk about it. Or my daughter. 

V: Well this sort of goes back to failure. It’s a full circle, they’re never allowed to fail unsupervised and to make those mistakes.

S: They can’t!

V: They’re just being judged.

S: Judged all the time. It’s also from a deficit point of view. Oh Aidan, here are things you can do. Or my daughter, here are things you can do to be better in school. At home, here are the things you can do to be a better participant in the family.

V: This literally sounds like my childhood, love you guys though but seriously (Laughing).

S: But when did we ever tell our kids, here are the good things that you’re doing? Especially in math, even if a kid is struggling, thanks for showing up to my class today.

V: No seriously.

S: Thanks for showing up.

V: Okay we could talk about this forever. I want to move on to hear about the importance of storytelling and history in math. I love that you call math the greatest story ever told. Tell me a bit about how you think incorporating storytelling and history into math would change things for kids. 

S: It’s really seeing our identity. Right now, most kids think math was created by aliens and left on a beach 80 years ago. 

V: (Laughing)

S: Something out of a test tube, right? 

V: It’s so separate from our reality.

S: It’s so inert and not human. 

V: So humanizing it.

S: Yeah so math is already human, we are in the process of rehumanizing it. So when we tell stories, we maybe hear and see ourselves. For example, Pascal. Everyone thinks of Pascal’s triangle which is fine.

V: So cool.

S: It is, it’s absolutely amazing but in terms of what he was better known as or in terms of his contributions, was his life after mathematics where he turned to religion and spirituality. It was also the time of some sort of health crisis in France. He actually vacated his own house so people and poor people could live. He lived his final days really on the street because he wanted to take care of people.

V: Okay, I was about to be like well how would this look in a classroom? But already you telling me that, I’m never going to forget that.

S: You're never going to forget that. 

V: It makes it so interesting, like a human being who did that is the one who invented Pascal’s triangle. It’s like celebrities, they're just like us.

S: Yeah it is! It’s the conjunction “and”, you are telling this “and” this “and” this, you’re colouring their lives. 

V: I love this!

S: You’re not making it seem like, Pascal gave us this, Pyhtagoras gave us this, that was their only purpose in life.

V: I  want to know all about this Pascal character now.

S: Well there’s some amazing stuff.

V: Was he single? Did he have multiple wives?

S: That I'm not sure.

V: But you can find out.

S: There’s a lot of darkness in math. You could find it. My favourite teacher in high school was Mr. Scott, my history teacher, and he wrote hardly any notes on the board. This was before the internet, early 80s, teaching ancient history and even the kids who would never come to school, we had a smoking area so the stoners.

V: You had a smoking area in your classroom? 

S: No! Outside the school.

V: I was like, what? What is this?

S: In the 70s, in Seneca College here in Toronto, you could actually smoke in the classroom.

V: What!?

S: Yeah back in the 70s. 

V: That seems really unfair. What about the non-smokers?

S: So I mean, everybody would be gripped by his stories. He’s telling us these stories of World War I in the trenches, rats this big.

V: I remember learning this and I was really into it actually, I was really obsessed with the trenches actually.

S: So was I, like mustard gas. People had to pee into these towels.

V: Okay never heard that. Why?

S: Because that would offset the mustard gas.

V: Oh my god, ew.

S: So they would have to wrap it around their faces. 

V: This is disgusting.

S: I know.

V: But look at how intrigued I am!

S: Of course! And then I wanted to learn more about World War I. I wanted to know about the Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele, all that kind of stuff. That was the same thing in math, there’s so many amazing stories.

V: Okay I actually love this. Please keep me posted on how this rolls out because I think this is actually a really interesting way to approach teaching kids math. I feel like they’d be so into it.

S: Especially kids who maybe are into history or into language, and humanities.

V: I’m not even interested in history but into juicy drama. Who isn’t these days?

S: Okay so I’ll tell you a really juicy drama story.

V: Oh my god yes.

S: So there was an Italian mathematician, he was super brilliant, Cardano. I think he was a physicist, chemist, biologist, he was a doctor, and I think he created the combination lock. He wrote something called the Horoscope of Christ.

V: We love horoscopes here (Laughing).

S: He did a lot of amazing things and he also was working on elementary probability, but he also predicted the day of his death.

V: Like accurately? 

S: Yeah the actual day of his death.

V: And he didn’t kill himself?

S: He did. 

V: Oh my god, what a guy. 

S: That’s basically the story. His ego, he goes, this is what I predicted so he took his own life.

V: What the fuck? That is juicy!

S: It’s really putting in all the colours. Here’s the thing. Math was created by and for humans. 

V: You think math was created by humans?

S: Yeah not aliens.

V: Well hold on a second though. What about pi?

S: What about pi?

V: I don’t know what about it? 

S: I don’t know, it's a constant.

V: But it wasn’t created by humans.

S: Not created but in terms of math, humans discovered pi.

V: Right. But they discovered it, so it was already here.

S: Yeah I know…

V: That’s for a whole other interview.

S: That’s the thing, these humans are not perfect. When you tell stories about people who aren’t perfect, which goes back to failure, the number of times these people have failed doing math problems. There’s a really nice story about Fermat's Last Theorem which was proven in 1983, but in the early 20th century there was a German industrialist, I forget his name. He was very despondent because I think his girlfriend at the time, their relationship was going south.

V: I already love this story.

S: And so he actually planned on committing suicide that night. He’s in the library and he came across this Fermat’s Last Theorem which obviously wasn’t proven at that time but he was like, “Oh maybe I can solve it”.

V: Right, before he kills himself.

S: Midnight, he had planned on killing himself at midnight but then he realized he was so engrossed in the math problem that midnight passed and then he realized, “Wow, okay. Maybe my life is worthwhile.”.

V: Did he solve it?

S: No he didn’t solve it.

V: Did he break up with his girlfriend?

S: He broke up with his girlfriend but he actually donated a prize to anyone who could solve it. 

V: And he didn’t kill himself? Math saved his life. This is fascinating, this is literally fascinating. I wish we could talk forever but I want to ask a couple more questions.

S: Sure.

V: You speak to a ton of teachers at math conferences, you’re kind of a math celeb. Your Medium page has so many followers, very impressive. We’ll plug that at the end. When you bring up the ideas of failure and storytelling in math, you were mentioning that because people are aware that something needs to change because of all the math anxiety, you get a positive reaction but I'm interested in the fact that you said that white males tend to be the main ones pushing back.

S: Well first of all they think that mathematics teaching history is not important. 

V: They think that?

S: They think, just teach the nuts and bolts, who cares.

V: Why though?

S: Well I mean my theory is that it's almost like this last bastion of white male authoritarianism and they're losing it. So the pushback comes from mostly white male high school teachers in terms of why we teach. The ironic part is that these teachers, if they actually knew the math history, they would know that the Fibonacci sequence did not come from Fibonacci, it actually came from Hemachandra, Sanskrit poet, a couple hundred years earlier.

V: Okay excuse me? This is blowing my mind. Then why is it called the Fib… okay no, we don’t have time. Don’t even tell me.

S: He didn’t discover it.

V: Really?

S: No. It came from Sanskrit poetry a couple hundred years earlier.

V: Tell me more about the white male situation. Do you think they’re like, no, this is our thing, don’t dig into it?

S: Well it’s almost like this last straw of encroachment, they see it as political correctness. Like now you want to infuse colour and now you want to talk about this. It’s not like we want to replace it, all the great Western mathematicians, which there are so many of, how about also the female mathematicians? How about the mathematicians of colour? It’s not a binary situation.

V: It’s not black and white so to speak.

S: Let’s include everything, right? But Western mathematics, that's why this book, The Crest of  the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics, most high school mathematics, these high school teachers, ironically who are saying we don’t care about it, most of the math they’re teaching is 9th century Indovedic mathematics, except for calc and statistics.

V: What does that even mean?

S: Well most of the math of quadratics, trigonometry, came from 9th century India.

V: Oh yeah, like it’s not white math.

S: Yeah. 

V: White math, I don’t know if that’s a term, sorry.

S: No I know…

V: I just meant it was discovered by white people (Laughing).

S: Remember K-12 math is just the basic foundation math, so that foundational math was discovered hundreds, thousands of years before, the Western Mathematics is more university based, a bit more advanced, especially the ideas of calculus which they start teaching in high school. That’s why K-12 is perfectly set up to teach the history. Why don’t  they talk about Brahmagupta because kids come across 0, or he came up with the plus sign. If ironically, they knew all the people that we’re talking about and they still say it’s not important, I might listen to them because they’re taking everything into account. But usually, invariably, most of these people are not aware of math history. Math history is something which never has been taught. 

V: I was unaware of any of this juicy ass gossip and I’m so excited!

S: I didn’t learn it in school, this is my own self directed professional development. 

V: Okay, final two questions. What would you change about the way math is taught in schools?

S: I think basics are very important. Just very quickly, 7 times 6 is a math fact, right?

V: 42.

S: But a better math fact is that 2 times 3 times 7 is 42. What you can now do is pick any number, pick 3, the two numbers left are 2 and 7, 2 times 7 is 14, 14 times 3 is 42. Kids create their own math facts. 

V: What? No I got that but…

S: What I’m saying is you break down numbers into their prime components.

V: We couldn’t finish the interview without bringing up prime numbers. 

S: If kids knew every number in terms of prime components, they can make their own math facts. Some math facts are more important than others.

V: Okay, so what would you change? Everything would just be prime, in terms of prime numbers.

S: Well no I would definitely have kids learn about prime numbers, the atoms, the building blocks of mathematics first. But also, I would also create a class called failure lab.

V: Love it, tell me.

S: So your whole goal is that you’re going to come out failing. What do you expect from failure lab? That you’re going to fail.

V: Fuck yes! This is the best idea! Okay final, final question. What would you say to someone who doesn't think they’re a math person?

S: Well first I would ask them why and why they think so because I want to hear from their point of view in terms of their math trauma or what they’ve experienced. I think you have to show some empathy, don’t just go, “Look at this problem!”, it’s not going to work like that.

V: Right.

S: You first have to completely understand. In fact when I work with kids, the first thing I do is almost the first whole session is based on empathy. Like yeah, I see that. It’s not about the fix, it’s first about the listening and then slowly but surely, you start to find that they are a math person, they’re just dormant. They are probably thinking mathematically in ways they don’t even think, whether it’s playing video games or doing Sudoku, or any kind of other lateral thinking. They are thinking mathematically and you pull that out and are like, hey, you know that’s thinking mathematically, that’s really clever.

V: I love this, this is so my strategy.

S: “It’s really logical, how’d you come up with that? You’re really interested, what made you think of that?”. Then you go, “That’s the same strategy you use to solve math problems.”. Again, give math problems that kids like! Give them something that they want to work on. “Okay times up”, “No, no I want to keep working on that”, then they take it home. That’s a good math problem.

V: You know those riddles that everyone loves, everyone gets so into them it’s like blah blah blah was half his age, but he was 3 times blah blah blah, how is this possible? Everyone’s like, “Oh my god I need to figure this out!”.

S: Do you have any of those?

V: Okay so every year we have 12 Days of the Math Guru where I do a riddle everyday and you can win a prize. It is fucking crazy. These kids who profess to hate word problems… I will have over a hundred direct messages in my inbox of people saying, “We were doing this at dinner”, “Me and my sister are arguing over what the answer is”, people will send me videos of them and their friends arguing over it, because they don’t have to do the problem, it’s for fun. Also because those brain teasers are phrased in such a way where you are kind of stumped in a fun way. You’re like, “Wait, how is that possible”, you start thinking about how it’s possible. That’s why I always argue that people are intrinsically curious and like math. They do. We’ve ruined it for them through education.

S: People don’t hate math because it’s hard, people hate math because it’s boring. 

V: Bam! Mic drop! Drop the mic. Actually David would kill me if I dropped the mic or touched it, we have to end this interview. Okay, Sunil, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

S: Are we still on?

V: Yeah we just have to say bye.

S: Oh I just have to say bye, okay. 

V: Bye!

S: Bye!

Episode Outro: Okay are you guys dead, like I’m dead. I don’t know about you but I'm dying to know more. Okay wait, I just thought about this right now but I feel like this is a genius idea. Imagine there was a celeb gossip magazine, but just for mathematicians so like headline: mathematicians are just like us! Flash to Einstein without his toupee, caught in a grocery store buying groceries, himself. Oh my god, the tragedy. Okay, who even knows if he wears a toupee but whatever I feel like this is a genius idea - please send me ideas for the magazine title. I feel like if I was a kid in class and I saw this, I would immediately be like, fine, teach me the Pythagorean Theorem, I need to know everything about this guy. Okay anyways, cool, maybe it’s just me. 

Um back to the episode, if you want to find out more about Sunil, grab a copy of one of his books, I’ll put them both in our show notes which you can find at www.themathguru.ca/maththerapy . PS I’m actually out of breath right now with excitement but anyways, gotta say the rest of the stuff which is: follow us on socials @themathguru, and a reminder that Math Therapy is hosted by me, your wild and wacky out of breath host, Vanessa Vakharia. It’s produced by Sabina Wex who probably thinks I'm insane right now and edited by David Kochberg who I’m looking at, and who totally, definitely thinks I’m insane right now. Our theme song is Waves by Goodnight, Sunrise which is my band and if you guys know someone who needs math therapy or needs to hear someone else getting math therapy or needs to hear the host of Math Therapy ranting, this is the place, send them to me. Write us a quick review on whatever podcast app you use because that makes a huge difference. 

I am determined to change the culture surrounding math and to publish this math celeb gossip magazine so help me spread the word, send me your ideas, I don't know. Let’s, you know… I’m fading here. It’s the end. I fucked up the end of the thing. That’s all for this week! Stay tuned for our next episode, it's out next Thursday! (Laughing) Sorry, I fucked it up. You can stop recording, David! David, David!

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