Des-blog

This post is part of an ongoing series of stories about our personal relationships with mathematics. We introduced this series in a recent post. Today’s math story is from Michelle Nguyen, copy editor here at Desmos.

I grew up believing that there are two types of people: those who are good at math and those who aren’t. I had been convinced that our aptitude for math was a born trait, a characteristic inextricably woven into our genetics, like eye shape or hair texture. I also noticed that being “good at math” was reserved for certain people in our society. Math people were geniuses, “model minorities,” destined for lucrative careers, boys. I fell into some of those boxes but right outside of others.

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When I was a classroom teacher, I often felt alone as the only math teacher at a small alternative school. I was envious of teachers at comprehensive high schools who had colleagues to collaborate with and share the workload of finding resources to support their students. When I became a Desmos Fellow, I found myself in the math department of my dreams. I suddenly had colleagues across the country who were willing to collaborate with me on exciting new classroom activities and share the workload of finding just the right resource to support my students.

At Desmos, we love educators and we love supporting them. That is why we launched a Facebook Group to help educators explore and take advantage of the full pedagogical potential that Desmos has to offer.

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This post is the first in an ongoing series of stories about our personal relationships with mathematics. We introduced this series in a recent post. Today’s math story is from Allison Hamburger, a member of the Desmos engineering team.

My math story is all about counting.

As a computer science major in college, I developed the habit of noting the exact number of people I perceived as women in a classroom. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in my math and computer science classes, there were often only a handful, sometimes even in a large lecture hall. In classes further outside of my major, that wasn’t the case.

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