By Carl Lee, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Kentucky and Chellgren Endowed Professor at the Chellgren Center for Undergraduate Excellence.

Editor’s Note: Carl Lee is a recipient of the 2014 Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award from the Mathematical Association of America.  This essay is based on his acceptance speech at the 2014 Joint Mathematics Meetings.

My place.  I was born into a family littered with academics, teachers, and Ph.D.s, including a grandfather who was an educational psychologist at Brown serving on one of the committees to create the SAT.  My early interest in things mathematical was nurtured in a home stocked with books by Gardner, Ball and Coxeter, Steinhaus, and the like.  With almost no exception my public school teachers were outstanding.  I was raised in a faith community, Bahá’í, that explicitly acknowledges the presence of tremendous human capacity and the high station of the teacher who nurtures it.  I played and experimented with, and learned, mathematics in both formal and informal settings.  Thus I grew up in a place in which I was able both to feed my mathematical hunger as well as to have a clear idea of what it was like to teach as a profession.  I thrived.

I recount this not to present a pedigree to justify personal worthiness, but rather to emphasize that I enjoyed a perfect match between my personal mathematical inclination and my learning environments.  Because of this background, it took me a while to understand the sometimes profound gap between others’ mathematical place, and the consequent care required to pay attention to that place, when designing an effective realm for learning.  As a K–12 student I often engaged in math classes at a high cognitive level merely as a result of a teacher’s direct instruction (“lecture”).  As a teacher I quickly learned that I engaged few of my students by this process.  Not all developed their “mathematical habits of mind” or “mathematical practices” through my in-class lectures and out-of-class homework (often worked on individually).  I now better appreciate the significant role of personal context and informal education in the development of students’ capacity. Continue reading →