Teaching math in real time

Abstract

Narrative, first-person accounts of a collective, traumatic event preserve the authenticity of the experience and defend against inaccurate retrospective idealizations. Such artifacts allow us time to process the event, extract the lessons it has for us, and to bring these lessons to bear on our practices. I offer my own narrative here, as a practitioner and researcher, of daily experiences of teaching mathematics in the USA during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Sudden perturbations to our regular educational practices expose ways in which those practices are incomplete or outright unstable. This, in turn, troubles the theories underpinning our practices. I offer my narrative as a point of communal reflection on what we do and know, and how we might do and know it better.