Going Beyond Numbers to Create a Math Symphony with MoMath's Cindy Lawrence

What if mathematics could be as captivating and enjoyable as a symphony concert? In our latest episode, we promise you'll discover innovative ways to make math not only accessible but genuinely fun for everyone. Join me, Dr. Lisa Hassler, alongside Cindy Lawrence, the inspiring Executive Director and CEO of the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), as we explore the vital role of mathematics in our modern world and tackle the concerning decline in math performance among US students.

Cindy shares her personal journey from CPA to leading MoMath, revealing how a volunteer opportunity ignited her passion for transforming public perceptions of math through interactive exhibits. Listen to our conversation about how the museum’s engaging displays, like the square-wheeled tricycle and MotionScape, make complex concepts like calculus come to life. We discuss the importance of human interaction in teaching math, changing the narrative around the subject, and showcasing how deeply intertwined math is with our daily lives.

Looking for ways to bring the joy of math into your home? We've got you covered with creative strategies for parents and educators. From noticing patterns and symmetry in your environment to solving real-world puzzles, we share practical tips to foster a positive math experience. You'll also hear inspiring stories like that of Eileen Collins, the first female commander of a space shuttle mission, who overcame her math struggles to achieve her dreams. Tune in to be inspired and learn how you can make math an exciting and integral part of learning and life.

Need math help? Go to MoMath and talk to a mathematician!

Chapters

• 0:35 Role and Research in Developing Math Skills
• 1:50 MoMath's Cindy Lawrence: Introduction and Background
• 6:41 Math Myths: Working to Challenge and Change Societal Views
• 15:15 Creating High Engagement with Math "Under the Hood"
• 19:37 Importance of Real-World Applications
• 23:32 Influencing Education Practice
• 27:46 Math Engagement Outside of the Classroom
• 32:33 Shaping the Next Generation of Math Learners: Advice for Educators & Parents
• 36:02 Wrap Up and Call to Action

Transcript

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 0:09

Welcome to The Brighter Side of Education: Research, Innovation and Resources. I'm your host, Dr. Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables and how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes? In this episode, we join the exciting world of mathematics and explore innovative approaches to making it both accessible and enjoyable.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 0:43

Mathematics plays a crucial role in developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills, essential competencies for navigating the complexities of the modern world. Mathematics is not merely about numbers and equations. It's a tool for fostering a mindset capable of addressing and innovating solutions to real-world challenges. However, recent data underscores the urgency of addressing the declining math performance among US students. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, naep 2022 saw the steepest declines in math scores since the assessment began in 1990. For instance, 38% of 8th graders performed below the basic level. Similarly, the Program for International Student Assessment, pisa, revealed that US students' math scores dropped to their lowest levels in history, equating to nearly two-thirds of a year of lost learning. This decline is troubling not only because it indicates gaps in mathematical literacy, but also because math skills are closely linked to broader academic and economic success. Finding ways to make math accessible and enjoyable is key to preparing our students for the future.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 1:50

Joining us today is Cindy Lawrence, the Executive Director and CEO of the National Museum of Mathematics, also known as MoMath. Cindy's journey into leading MoMath is as dynamic as the exhibits she oversees. She began her career as a CPA that transitioned into education Under her leadership. MoMath is as dynamic as the exhibits she oversees. She began her career as a CPA that transitioned into education. Under her leadership, MoMath has become a beacon of interactive math education, attracting over a million visitors and influencing audiences around the world. She strives to change public perceptions of mathematics and to improve and diversify mathematics education. Cindy, it's a pleasure to have you with us today.

Cindy Lawrence: 2:25

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 2:28

So your career journey from accounting to leading the National Museum of Mathematics is fascinating. Can you share how your passion for math developed over the years and how it led you to open the only museum in the United States dedicated solely to mathematics?

Cindy Lawrence: 2:47

United States dedicated solely to mathematics. Sure, I will start by saying my passion for math wasn't with me for my entire life. I remember in second grade very clearly coming back to school after summer vacation and being given an assessment and realizing that I had forgotten how to subtract when you had to borrow. It was something we had learned, I think, at the end of the previous year, and what really sticks with me is how frustrated I felt, how unhappy, how I thought I wasn't capable in mathematics and none of that turned out to be the case. I had simply forgotten something I had been taught several months prior and eventually I came back to mathematics. I was good in math, I did enjoy math, but that experience stays with me and I think about that a lot when I think about talking about how we interact with children around math and how sometimes there are preconceived notions. I know we'll get to that in another question, but, like many people, where I really developed a love and even further love of math was due to a teacher, and a wonderful calculus teacher when I was in high school who clearly loved math himself, and that enthusiasm was contagious, and this is a story we hear a lot from people who do go into mathematics that there was that key person in their life often a teacher who made a difference to them and showed them something beautiful, surprising, amazing, interesting, engaging about mathematics that set them on a path. So education is definitely a key, and having educators in the classrooms who themselves are passionate about mathematics. There is no substitute for that, and I think I'm a good example of that myself.

Cindy Lawrence: 4:30

But my journey from starting as a CPA and ending up working for a not-for-profit museum what was the only museum of math in the country at the time that we opened is really one of chance than anything. I was very happily working as a CPA. I was in fact teaching an online review program, helping other people become CPAs, at the same time as I was raising a family, and so I was working remotely and working online. Before that was something that everyone was doing, you know, 25, 30 years ago, and I happened to volunteer to help a friend who was trying to open a small math museum and the first thing he was going to do was bring some math exhibits to a festival in New York City, and I raised my hand and volunteered for what I thought was a one-day event. I had liked math and thought it would be fun to work on this project, but I literally thought I was volunteering just to help with one day. I would come in that day and sit at a table or talk to people.

Cindy Lawrence: 5:37

It turned out what I actually was volunteering for was actually organizing what we would bring to that festival. And that didn't deter me either, because in my mind we were going to bring flyers and maybe we would have some giveaways like pencils or calculators. I wasn't yet involved in the breadth and depth of mathematics to see it as more than that, and it turned out what I had volunteered for was to hire an exhibit design firm and work with them and with mathematicians and build interactive, engaging, hands-on, life-size exhibits about mathematics which had nothing to do with pencils or calculators, and I was sort of fan one. I fell in love with the project as we were developing these exhibits. I was in awe of what we were doing and what I was learning, and so I just kind of fell into it and ultimately quit the job that I'd had for 18 years and threw myself 100% into opening the nation's only museum of mathematics.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 6:42

Many people believe that math is only for geniuses, that it's dry, rote and has no real world application. There's also a perception that math is just about numbers, that you're either born good at it or not, and that boys are naturally better at math than girls. How do you think these perceptions develop, and how is MoMath working to challenge and change these societal views?

Cindy Lawrence: 7:03

Wow. So you've mentioned a lot of things there and I hope I don't miss responding to any of those things, because they're all important. So, first of all, the thought that math is only for geniuses is not true. Like anything else, people are different. Some people are naturally better at a particular skill than other people. For example, somebody might have a talent athletically, and so they might be very good at shooting hoops in basketball and they manage to get the ball on the hoop.

Cindy Lawrence: 7:45

All know that if you practice, you will get better, and you can play and earn a spot on the school basketball team simply by practicing and working at it. So it doesn't matter that maybe the kid down the block was better on day one. You might actually end up becoming as good or even better. So math is no different from that. And maybe there's somebody who sees something more quickly than another person does. That doesn't mean the other person can't be trained to see things quickly also. So I think we confuse the idea that people are starting at different places with the idea that they're going to end up in different places, and that's just not true. You may be musically talented and your friend is not, but if they take lessons and practice, they may become a concert pianist, whereas you never get further than tapping out a tune on the piano, even though you started out perhaps having more what we might call talent. And so we need to get away from the idea that there's something innate to each person that makes them good or bad in math, and I have my own example of that, which is I do have three children. All of them today are successful and accomplished in math related fields, and you would never know that as children they were very different in their abilities toward mathematics. One of them was very obviously very strong in mathematics from an early age. One of them was good in mathematics, but not necessarily remarkably so, and one of them struggled to learn how to add single digit numbers. I would defy you to look at my three children, who are all in math-related fields today, and identify which one was good in math, which one was better in math and which one was terrible in math at the earliest age, and I'm talking kindergarten, first grade, because by the time they were later in elementary school, you already couldn't tell them apart. But if a teacher had said this one's good in math, this one's great in math, this one's not good in math and grouped them accordingly and not given them the enrichment and the challenges and the fun side of mathematics that got them engaged, they would have gone through life thinking they are not good in math. Similarly, in my second grade experience, a teacher might have said this is a kid who's not good in math. Similarly, in my second grade experience, a teacher might have said this is a kid who's not good in math. I turned out to be very good in math.

Cindy Lawrence: 10:09

So I just think not everybody starts in the same place and we need to recognize that. So sometimes you hear people say everybody's equal and I think that falls a little flat. If you've had multiple students in your classroom, if you're an educator, if you're a parent with multiple children, you realize that nobody is exactly equal. Really, in any ability. Everybody is coming from a different place. Some people learn differently than others. Maybe you're a visual learner or an auditory learner, or you learn more with tactile manipulatives. But I think everybody can do math. Everybody can be as good as they want to be in math. It just is a matter of whether they want to devote the time and effort to working on it and becoming better at it, like it's like any other skill.

Cindy Lawrence: 10:56

Whether boys are better at math than girls is something I don't believe. I have two daughters and a son. My personal experience says that's not true. But, more interestingly, I've interacted with a lot of mathematicians from Eastern Europe and the stereotype is opposite in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, girls are viewed as being better in math, or at least in some Eastern European countries. Girls are viewed as being naturally better at math than boys, and to me that's very telling. Right there. It's cultural.

Cindy Lawrence: 11:29

For some reason, in our culture we have seen men and boys as STEM professionals or in STEM fields, and less so in the culture to see women in those fields, and that's something that many people have been working to change and it's been a slow change. MoMath is also working to change that, and you asked what we were doing to address those perceptions and those problems, and we are now. We just completed our second year and we'll be going into a third year of a program in which we bring early career female mathematicians. So these are young women who either recently became PhDs or are on their way to becoming PhDs and they come to us to learn how to interact with the general public and give an engaging general audience talk on their area of mathematical expertise, which is not an easy thing to do and the idea is that these women then agree to go back to their home communities and deliver this outreach talk to middle schools, to undergraduate math clubs, to libraries, anywhere they can.

Cindy Lawrence: 12:36

And the idea is that if we can get more younger women, women in middle school and high school seeing role models, seeing women who are mathematicians, that will start to move the needle. Because when you don't see it, you develop a perception, it sort of self-perpetuates. If all of your math teachers were always men, all of your math professors in college were always men, then that creates sort of a background assumption, even without thinking about it, that yeah, more men go into math than women. So we're trying to move the needle a little bit by actively training young women in math so they can go out and show the world that women actually do math and do a great job at it.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 13:18

So why is it important, then, to address the myths, for both children and adults, particularly in fostering a growth mindset?

Cindy Lawrence: 13:27

Well, if you don't see it, you don't think you can be it. So if you're a young woman who likes math and I've heard the story from many, many women that they love math but they didn't see themselves in it they never saw a number of female role models in mathematics, and so they used their math skills and went into something else. Maybe they went into engineering or science or you know, oftentimes something related, but not always. Some of them go into completely different fields, but many people who are good in math didn't see a role model and didn't see a path forward or sometimes were actively discouraged by people in their lives, and so we're losing half of the potential as a society.

Cindy Lawrence: 14:09

When you think about the role that mathematicians often play in solving the world's problems whether those are technology problems or efficiency problems or problems of making the world a better place math is very often under the hood, and if we lose half of our good mathematician population so if you figure a certain number of people are skilled in math and want to learn more and could go forward and have the potential to become mathematicians and half of them don't because they don't perceive that it's something that their gender or their ethnicity does, then we lose half the potential for the country, and so we want to make sure that everyone has the same potential, not just for the individuals, but for the good of a productive society. I've also spoken with many people who work for companies, industries, national defense, and they can't find enough mathematicians to hire, so there's a real scarcity, and trying to fill the pipeline is a big part of why we exist.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 15:15

Absolutely. Engagement is often cited as a key factor in learning, particularly in subjects like math, where student interest can wane. How does MoMath ensure that its exhibits and programs not only capture attention, but also sustain it in a way that deepens mathematical understanding?

Cindy Lawrence: 15:34

So we spend a lot of time developing exhibits that are engaging, and that's always our first question before anything else Is it engaging? Will people enjoy it? Will they come over and play with it? Of course, the question that follows very closely thereafter is is there real math under the hood? Might not be real math. That's really why we exist, and I like to compare it to music.

Cindy Lawrence: 15:59

In this way If you take your child to hear the symphony and they hear a beautiful violin solo and they leave that performance and they say I want to play the violin, okay, you might go out and rent a violin for your child and get lessons for them. And they sound terrible in the beginning. And they have to learn how to hold the violin, how to hold the. And they have to learn how to hold the violin, how to hold the bow. They have to learn how to read music, which is notation that nobody is born knowing, because it's a made up notation, but one that we all agree, when we put circles on five lines, what that means in terms of what note should be playing. And they have to practice their scales, which is not the symphony they heard. It's just up and down and up and down. But they're learning to read music and they're learning the mechanics of how to hold their instrument, and the reason they do all of that is because they heard that solo in that symphony performance. In math we also have to practice addition and multiplication facts. We have to learn the mechanics. But if we never let a child hear the symphony of mathematics, there's no motivation for all the hard work that has to go into becoming proficient.

Cindy Lawrence: 17:06

So LOMATH exists with its hopefully very engaging exhibits to be that symphony. A great example is probably our most well-known and most popular exhibit. It is a tricycle with square wheels and you can ride that tricycle because we have figured out what shape the floor needs to be to mate perfectly with a rolling square. And people come in and they're delighted and it's unexpected and everybody wants to take a picture and post it on social media that they're riding a bicycle with square wheels. But there's real math under the hood. How did the shape of that track get determined? You actually need calculus to answer that question. And so, yes, it's engaging, it's fun. We hope it pulls people in. It's sort of the symphony that then makes someone go back to school and say I want to understand how they did that. And what if it was a different shape wheel? Could it work with a triangular wheel? Could it work with a hexagonal wheel? And so they hear the symphony at MoMath, and that's what hopefully incentivizes them to want to learn more and do the work and do the mechanics and take the time to learn the math that will allow them to maybe create their own symphony, maybe create something beautiful and wonderful of their own.

Cindy Lawrence: 18:21

Now the challenge is how do you convey all of that when someone's riding a square wheel tricycle? And the answer is sort of twofold. On one hand, we're not trying to convey calculus to every visitor who walks in the door, but what we are trying to convey is that math can make something that seems impossible possible. Math can be something you play with, have fun with, enjoy, and so when people come to a place with math in the very name of the place MoMath and they have fun, that's changing a perception of mathematics right there In terms of going into the deeper math.

Cindy Lawrence: 18:58

Math is, at its heart, a very human endeavor, and the best way to convey what's going on is by human to human interaction, and so we have a wonderful staff which ranges from high school volunteers to recent college graduates, to adult mathematicians, and our staff interact with the visitors around the exhibits, and I think that's a really important part of engagement and really letting people see where is the math under the hood. Yes, it's fun to ride the square wheel tricycle, but how do I connect that to math? And so it's really a very community-oriented endeavor.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 19:37

So why is it important for learners to see how math applies in everyday life, and can you share some examples of real-world applications that are featured in MoMath's exhibits and programs?

Cindy Lawrence: 19:48

So I think too many times we view math as something that happens in a classroom, that doesn't have any relevancy outside the classroom, when in fact so much of what goes on in the world around us is driven by mathematics. Our cell phones are driven by mathematics. The way the traffic lights hopefully coordinate so that you can drive smoothly through a city is mathematics. The way airplanes are routed, the way deliveries are routed, all of this has mathematics under the hood. In terms of an example of an exhibit at MoMath that has a real-world application, we have a very popular exhibit called MotionScape and what we do is we put you your entire body, you are in a video game and you look at a screen and there's sort of a target that you need to stay within these two little gates and you have to move your body backwards and forwards on a track to stay within these two gates, which are moving as they come across the screen.

Cindy Lawrence: 20:50

And what we're doing, as you're running backwards and forwards on this track, playing this video game, is we're tracking your position, your velocity and your acceleration. That's calculus, and visitors are watching the change. So when you're, when you're standing still, of course, everything's zero, but when you're moving forward, your position might be changing, but maybe your speed is constant, or maybe you're accelerating, so your speed is changing. So we're using that calculus exhibit and the real-world application of that is when you drive a car. If you don't have an understanding of the relationship between position, velocity and acceleration, you may drive too close to the car in front of you. You may end up not being able to hit the brakes quickly enough if the car in front of you stops short. So that's just one example, but math really is all around us.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 21:43

Absolutely. I love how you are calling for proposals for mathematical artists. I think you're doing some sort of weaving or something. Was there a weaving that was there's?

Cindy Lawrence: 21:53

a topological crochet class, which has been so popular it fills with a waiting list the minute we open registration. Wow, we have exhibits in the museum that allow you to paint with mathematical symmetries, to sculpt with geometric shapes. There is a temporary exhibition on right now that is a collaboration of mathematicians and artists and artists. We've also had programs that talk about math and many other things math and music, math and dance, math and birds, you name it. There's math under the hood.

Cindy Lawrence: 22:30

But I do think for some people who view themselves as being more creative, more art oriented, let's say, when they come into the Museum of Mathematics they don't expect to see anything that they will connect with and very often they gravitate toward those exhibits that highlight those connections and they come away with a newfound appreciation of mathematics and how it does connect with art or with music or with movement. And the more connections we can make, the more we can change perceptions and improve perceptions, so that people don't just think about the basics that they learned in the classroom, which are important to learn, but that's not all there is to math. That's like saying learning how to read music on a staff is all there is to music. No, it's about the creation, the beauty, the human experience we have. Sharing music with each other, listening together that's what we're trying to create at MoMath. So people leave and realize that math is actually an aesthetic pursuit. It's a pursuit you can do with others, share with others and find joy together.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 23:32

You also collaborate with schools. You offer field trips and teacher training. In what ways do you think MoMath's approach to math education can influence broader educational practices?

Cindy Lawrence: 23:43

Typically manipulatives and physicality in the classrooms. For math classrooms goes away around second grade and the joy of math sometimes goes away along with those physical manipulatives. To mathematicians math is akin to a puzzle and if you think about how we all feel when there are a thousand pieces to a puzzle sitting in front of us, it can be daunting, it can be overwhelming. You can say how will I ever do this? But then you look and you see two pieces that connect and so you just put those two together. Now you look a little more and you see another piece, or another couple pieces. Now you've got the ends together and you're trying to do the middle. And when you get to the point where you put that last piece in the puzzle, there's this very human sense of satisfaction and exhilaration and joy. I did it, I did it, and mathematicians will tell you that's the same kind of feeling that they have.

Cindy Lawrence: 24:42

So in the classrooms we're talking about mechanics often and if we can bring a little bit of joy into the classroom and it's hard because there are so many requirements on teachers, there are assessments that students need to pass but if we can bring some of that math enrichment whether it's a math enrichment club, or it's once a month on a Friday we're going to do something fun with math, or whether a teacher can actually incorporate something fun about math into their everyday lesson. It's about bringing joy into the classroom. I should mention that we run a prize, a $25,000 prize program. We give a prize every year to a teacher who has a really engaging math lesson for a middle school classroom that is both tied to the curriculum, so something that they need to cover anyway, but joyful and that kids will enjoy doing, and so that's called the Rosenthal Prize, and anybody can look that up online and see all the prior lessons and hopefully teachers who maybe don't have ideas about how to bring joy into the classroom might find some ideas from that website or others.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 25:49

That is so exciting. With all of the different things that you're doing, like with the teacher training. What impact have you seen with being able to do that collaboration, the education field.

Cindy Lawrence: 26:00

So most of our experience here comes from feedback from teachers who bring their students to Lomath for a field trip, or sometimes we bring our exhibits to a school, and we consistently get feedback from teachers who say that the kids had a really wonderful experience, but also one that stays with them.

Cindy Lawrence: 26:21

At one point we had a professional evaluation firm come in and evaluate some of our traveling exhibits that we brought to a one-day science festival, and they not only interviewed parents and families while they were there, but they got phone numbers and they called two three weeks later and they found it remarkable that the families were still talking about the math that they had learned from an interaction walking through a festival and spending, you know, 15 minutes with an exhibit, and so that's what we hear from teachers too that the kids are still talking about what they learned days later, and we hope that that engagement encourages and inspires students.

Cindy Lawrence: 27:03

We've now been open for more than 12 years and something that I had long hoped to happen has actually happened. I had hoped that there would be young adults and hopefully eventually older adults out in the world who would be talking about their career and would point to MoMath as a place that inspired them and we've had multiple examples now of young people that are in the top universities in our country or going to even graduate school at the top universities who grew up at MoMath, and it gives me such pleasure to hear those stories and see those young people and to feel like we made a little bit of a difference in somebody's life.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 27:45

Absolutely Engaging with math outside of the classroom develops a deeper appreciation for the subject, I think. So what are some ways that parents can engage their children with math at home?

Cindy Lawrence: 27:57

So I think it's all about viewing math as something you play with. Yeah, you can take out flashcards and drill your children on addition facts or multiplication facts, and maybe that's even important to do, but it's not fun. So what is fun? What is fun is looking around and seeing where math is in the world around us. So everywhere you go, you'll see tilings, you'll see tessellations. This is even in your bathroom or your kitchen. There are tiles. How do they fit together? How many different shapes are there? Could it go on forever. Are there gaps? Are there overlaps? Everywhere you look, you'll see symmetry.

Cindy Lawrence: 28:32

Why does a building look the same on this side and that side? Or maybe it doesn't? And how does that feel to us? How do we perceive the beauty or the lack thereof? Perceive the beauty or the lack thereof? Geometry, shapes how do we put things together? How do you know if you go on vacation and you have a suitcase and you're trying to fit everything into your suitcase? Or now you have multiple family suitcases but they all have to fit into the trunk of your car? That's math too. So kind of pointing out where the math is around us and playing with it. You know puzzles that we do.

Cindy Lawrence: 29:03

There's very much math inherent in the Rubik's cube, for example, is highly mathematical. There's something called group theory. That's an advanced area of study in mathematics, but if you're learning how to solve a Rubik's cube, you're doing group theory, you're using it and so kind of looking at the world around us and pointing out. Even you know, even on a weekend, at home, we're going to run some errands. And in which order should we run those errands? Should we go to the post office and then the grocery store and then the bank, or in some other order? And what's the most efficient way to get to three places and come back home? There's math in that too, even in terms of what route you're going to take.

Cindy Lawrence: 29:42

This road is longer, but I can go faster home. There's math in that too, even in terms of what route you're going to take. Well, on this, this road is longer but I can go faster. This road is shorter, but I have to drive more slowly, which is going to get me there faster? Or dating. This is a recipe for four, but we're having eight people for dinner tonight. How do we change the recipe? So, just trying to pull out some of the math and really model, being joyful around it. Of course, coming to MoMath enjoying our exhibits or even for those who are not in the area, enjoying our online programs, is another way. If a parent struggles to see the joy of math or the math around them themselves, there's a wealth of programs they can come to with their children of all ages and hopefully experience a little bit of the joy of math.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 30:30

Some of your programs that you offer that are online are like the monthly math gym, and then there's the folding Fridays origami that you have and a weekly loving math for K-3 students online. I think that's where you're reading stories and doing games.

Cindy Lawrence: 30:48

It's all fun. It's all hopefully designed to have kids laughing, enjoying, creating, seeing math in a different way than what they see in the classroom. That's really the point of it, because you know what Kids will focus on something that they are engaged in. So if you enjoy doing something, then you're more interested in learning about how it works and what's behind it, whereas if you don't enjoy doing something, you know you do what you have to do and you walk away. So we're all about finding the enjoyment and the fun and the playful side of mathematics.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 31:23

Absolutely. You also have the Ask a Mathematician online and then tutoring.

Cindy Lawrence: 31:29

We try to reach people wherever they are and try to provide what people need. The Ask a Mathematician is a particularly lovely program because it's really kind of no holds barred. We get adults asking math questions. Maybe they read something in the news that didn't make sense for them. We have parents who sometimes come with homework questions that they're trying to help their children with, but they themselves don't know the answer, so they're looking for help from us. And then we have kids that come and they just have interesting questions like about infinity or about zero or about how you become a mathematician or what do you do all day as a mathematician. And I love those programs because they are so open-ended and it's a dialogue and everybody participates, and that is one thing I think that the pandemic left us with. That is a plus that everybody is comfortable joining a program online and and interacting with each other, and we'll have people of all ages from all over the world interacting in a room together and there's something very joyful about that.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 32:33

So, as we look toward the future and shaping the next generation of math learners, what advice would you give to educators and parents?

Cindy Lawrence: 32:42

I think the advice I would most want to give to educators and parents is to please get away from this idea that we can identify someone who will be good in math and who will not be good in math, and I'd like to leave you with two examples that go beyond my own family. The first one is Steven Strogatz, who is one of the most prominent mathematicians in our country and he's excellent at interacting with a general public, and he will say he was never the fastest one in his math class. He was the one who struggled and had to think deeply, but yet he did, and he has become incredibly successful in the world of mathematics. So this idea that the kids who are really fast must be better at it and everybody else is not good at it. We need to dispel that notion, not just in the classroom but even with parents at home, because how a parent interacts with their child around math is really going to set a lot of how the child views themselves in mathematics. The other example that I like to share is about Eileen Collins.

Cindy Lawrence: 33:47

Eileen Collins is an astronaut and she was the first female commander of a space shuttle mission in our space shuttle program here in the United States and she gave a talk that I happened to see and what she talked about was the fact that she was not good in math all throughout high school and calculus was something that she did not master I can't remember if she didn't master it or didn't even try and take it in high school and she was very happy when she graduated from high school that she would never have to encounter mathematics again and she wanted to be a pilot and then an astronaut. And she wanted to be a pilot and then an astronaut. And when she got to college, much to her dismay, she found that she needed to master calculus or she was not going to become a pilot or an astronaut. And because she so strongly had an ambition in terms of her career, she said she just made a decision that she was going to do whatever it took to figure out this calculus topic and she wasn't going to give up and she wasn't going to walk away. And indeed she did master it and she did become a pilot and she did become an astronaut, and a very successful astronaut.

Cindy Lawrence: 34:54

And this is high school. This is somebody who perceived herself and probably her teachers and her parents may have perceived her the same way as not being strong in math throughout high school. And if she could become good in math at that late stage of her educational life, so can everybody else. And so we should not look at the child in kindergarten who has trouble understanding numbers or counting or comparisons or addition or subtraction and write them off as not going to be good math. It's just too soon to tell, and maybe the light bulb hasn't gone on yet. Maybe they need an approach that's different from the one that we've been trying. Maybe it just takes a little bit more time, but everybody can master mathematics if they want to and if they have an incentive to. So we try to be part of that incentive, and I would encourage parents and educators to have that mindset of the fact that everybody can be good and everybody can enjoy math. We just have to find the right path in.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 35:58

And MoMath sounds like it's definitely one of those amazing paths in. So thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing the incredible work you're doing at MoMath. Your passion for making math accessible and fun is truly inspiring.

Cindy Lawrence: 36:12

Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure chatting with you and I hope people will go to MoMath. org and see all of the programs we have Will come to visit us. We're right now on Fifth Avenue in the center of Manhattan and we'd love to see everybody in person or online and share our brand of mathematics with everyone.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 36:36

Changing math mindset starts with us. Include more hands-on, real-world math activities into your life. Visit MoMath or explore their free online resources to see how fun and engaging math can be. Let's work together to build a generation of confident, curious learners who see math as a source of joy. If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at lisa@ drlisahrhassler. com, or visit my website at www. drlisahassler. com and send me a message. If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. And if you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the supporter link in the show notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.