Author: Jo Boaler

This book was floating around my Math department and when I asked about taking it home to read over the summer to prep me for the upcoming year, the answer was a resounding no. The veteran teachers who had it were still using it as a reference for their own practice.

For that reason, I made no hesitation to purchase it outright (something I rarely do anymore) with the possibility to offering it to someone else if I didn’t feel it had a permanent spot on my shelf. Within two chapters, I cleared some space for a lifetime commitment.

I loved Math, but Boaler gives a wonderful explanation to get me liking it even more. She has a way of opening your eyes to what Math really is outside of a traditional classroom (where most of us secured our disdain for the subject) and why the parameters for learning it are much wider than most people think.

Our ideas about the subject are narrow from the elementary to high school grades because the North American education systems are designed to teach to a test. Drill and kill until the correct multiple choice option is selected for a standardized test, which only shows how far behind we are compared to other countries.

The irony is those other countries use the philosophy Boaler speaks about in this book, which teaches Math as a subject with multiple ways to think about it, and still manage to crush those tests.

Knowing people who are in the upper academic circles of the Mathematics field, they can tell you how artistic and creative the subject really is, even if it requires tremendous amounts of discipline (give me one subject that does not). It’ll be exciting to bring this into my classroom.

With many examples to use and reference points for further reading, I’m elated to have this in my personal library.