A Quote by DeRay Mckesson

I think about all of my students who were math-phobic, who didn't believe they could learn math, who didn't understand, who didn't think they were smart enough, and by the end, they understood that they already had the gifts, and my job was to help them access them, and I believe that.
I noticed there were so many people, especially women, who would come up to me having recognized me from TV and say, 'I heard you were a math person, why math? Oh my gosh, I could never do math!' I could just see their self-esteem crumbling; I thought that was silly, so I wanted to make math more friendly and accessible.
There are two versions of math in the lives of many Americans: the strange and boring subject that they encountered in classrooms and an interesting set of ideas that is the math of the world, and is curiously different and surprisingly engaging. Our task is to introduce this second version to today's students, get them excited about math, and prepare them for the future.
I'd never been a teacher before, and here I was starting my first day with these eager students. There was a shortage of teachers, and they had been without a math teacher for six months. They were so excited to learn math.
I thought about majoring in Math, Chemistry and English, but Math had the fewest requirements, so I went with it. I knew I wanted to teach, and Math was my field, so I studied Math.
I think we need more math majors who don't become mathematicians. More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers, more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won't get there unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhile for kid geniuses.
Two contrasting attitudes: non-math person: "Math is so abstract." i.e. "hard to understand" math person: We abstract *in order to understand.* Part of our job is to teach people this latter mentality.
If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.
It was a weird stage of my life, to leave Simon & Garfunkel at the height of our success and become a math teacher. I would talk them through a math problem and ask if anyone had any questions, and they would say, 'What were the Beatles like?'
You know, students who major in elementary education - they're going to be grade school teachers - they have the highest rates of math anxiety of any college major. And they bring that into the classroom. So you find students being introduced to math concepts by teachers who may have not only a lack of training but also a lack of enthusiasm about math.
The teachers were focused on helping these students. The students benefited from hands-on teaching and a faculty who cared about them and their success in life and soon the students began to believe in themselves and the reality that they could make something of their lives.
I believe in the American people. It's - I believe in trusting them, I believe in empowering them, and I think, at the end of the day, the only force strong enough to change the course we're on is the grass roots across the country.
I grew up with plenty of smart people. They would beat me at chess; they could solve brain teasers before I could, but then they would struggle in algebra. These were incredibly smart people who simply did not have the foundation in math that I had.
When I began teaching, my colleagues and I quickly realized that our students didn't have access to the same resources we had growing up. We knew there were supplies and resources that could help our students, but our school district simply couldn't afford them.
Veronika had noticed that a lot of people she knew would talk about the horros in other people's lives as if they were genuinely concerned to help them, but the truth was that they took pleasure in the suffering of others, because that made them believe they were happy and that life had been generous with them
If some day you're struggling with math, and you think, 'I don't think I can do this,' you can - you actually can. Everybody has their hard days - I definitely had mine - and you get through them, and you learn from that stumble, and then you're onto the next problem.
This much I'm sure of. Chances for winning = 1 - (# of math students playing)/ (# of math students cheering). That's a fraction.
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