My Remarks Today Accepting the National Math Leadership Award at NCSM

Regular programming returns next week.

This is a very busy week for math education in the United States with groups of math teachers, math supervisors, and math education researchers all gathering in Chicago, Illinois, right now.

I’m hosting a panel discussion for Amplify today and I’ll be delivering a new session tomorrow at 9:30A called “Everything That Can Go Right When Students Get It Wrong,” a session that combines a bunch of research, several decades of classroom video, and the kind of overeager slidework that, probably for the best, you’ll only find at one of my sessions.

Also today, I accepted the Ross Taylor / Glenn Gilbert award given annually by the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics for national leadership in math education, joining the ranks of some people I consider a really big deal.

I hesitate to mention any of this because, obviously, it’s the opposite of humble. But:

1. This is easy content in a busy week.

2. You all figure prominently here.

What I Said

Thank you for this honor.

Look I have been trying to understand math education for the last twenty years, drafting my thoughts about math education, on blogs and newsletters and tweets and other places safe from peer review or editors or any kind of good sense or oversight really. I am sure that something I have written in there has annoyed every single member of the selection committee at one point or another. So I want to say, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for taking the high road here.

A few other notes of thanks:

Certainly, to my wife. People like me, like many of you, people who are invited to speak their very important thoughts into microphones in big rooms, we are often a lot to live with and I’m grateful for her patience and encouragement.

Thanks to Jason Zimba, who has helped a generation of math students and teachers experience the depth and breadth of mathematics, the facets of math that make it worth teaching and learning.

To Steve Leinwand, who taught me the value of picking a good fight and fighting to win.

To Phil Daro, who taught me you don’t have to pick all the fights.

To Marilyn Burns, who has helped me and thousands of other educators understand that students are more than malfunctioning versions of adults, that their thoughts are earnest, genuine, and important. 

To Allan Bellman, who conned me into this line of work twenty years ago by having me intern in an honors precalculus class with students who adored math and adored me. I got my credential on the assumption that that experience would be a lot more common, and things have turned out okay anyway.

Many thanks to advisors past and present. To my colleagues at Desmos and Amplify. I love what we get to do and build every day. To every teacher who has ever dropped into my inbox or my mentions or comments. I’m so grateful to that community of people whose faces and names I don’t really know but who teach me constantly. [That’s you! -dm]

I love this work. The work of education is a major artery of social, civic, and economic life today and I’m so grateful I get to end every day feeling completely full—intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.

So thank you for this honor. I intend to put it on layaway and make installment payments on it for the rest of my professional life, telling whoever, wherever, and however I can the truths as I understand them: that students are brilliant, math is creative, and teaching is some of the most sophisticated work and one of the most sacred relationships humans have ever constructed. Thank you all.