Ron:

Welcome to Math: Universally Speaking. This is Ron Martiello, and today we have a very special guest. We have Pam Brett from The Blue Glasses Podcast. Hi Pam, 

Pam: 

Hey, Ron. How’s it going? 

Ron:

Good. We just got over a couple bloopers there, but we’re right on track now, are we? 

Pam:

I think it’s awesome. Starting with bloopers is like the best, puts us right in the energy.

Ron:

So, oh my goodness, so. And you know what? The pressure’s on? Because Pam’s a podcaster too, and she is such a pro at this, and so I just, I love having her here. I want to honor her. Pam, tell me a little bit more about you and Blue Glasses Math,

Pam:

First of all, thank you so much, Ron, for having me here. I love your spirit. I think you got the best energy. So I’m super thrilled to have this conversation. I appreciate it. It’s actually interesting, because the first time we spoke on the phone, actually, we had this whole conversation, and we both said we should have recorded that because, yeah, so it’s gonna replicate that conversation, yeah. So I think it’s funny that you say that, you know, I’m a big podcaster, because literally, every time I hit record, I’m like, Wait, am I doing this? Right? What am I doing? And I say that with complete humility, because when I first started thinking about doing a podcast, like, who? Why would I? But it just kept coming to me, right? I just want to do a podcast. I just want to do podcasts. And so the first time I hit record, I actually recorded. Here’s a funny story about the podcast, and then I’ll get into my story. Go for it. Go for it, right? So I was at the NCSM Conference in Washington, DC, the National Council of supervisors of math as an attendee, I was not speaking, and I was kind of sleuthing around, trying to get as many selfies that I could with all of the math education. I don’t know celebrities and who do I see in the exhibit exhibition hall, but, um, Graham. Graham Fletcher, so we all know Graham. I have been following him forever, ever ever since he did those first progression videos of, like the fractions, where he’s like writing on the poster board. Love those. And so I saw him. He was talking to a group of people, and I was waiting for that conversation to be over, and then as soon as it was over, I went over and I introduced myself. I did not have a podcast at that time, and I said, I think I’m, I think I’m thinking about starting a podcast. I had recorded one episode, but I hadn’t hit submit. I didn’t even know I was recording on GarageBand. I mean, I was like, really low like, I guess high tech, low tech, I don’t even know. And he said, Awesome. Can’t wait to hear it. So I went back to my hotel room that night and hit publish. And it wasn’t, I actually should reach out to him to be I guess, because I wasn’t, like, I kind of wanted affirmation from somebody in the math ed world, and so I did. So I hit publish that night when I went back to my hotel room, and that’s how the podcast started.

Ron:

Oh, you just cannonballed! You just like, jumped right in. 

Pam:

Oh, yeah, I didn’t have, I don’t think I had a website. Maybe I did. I don’t know. Yeah, I was building the website. I was building the website. I had already recorded. I hit go, and that was the end of that. 

Ron:

So, yeah, that’s why, that’s why we get along. Because I’m a cannonball or two, I just like, jump in. Let’s go. Let’s figure it out later.

Pam:

Yeah. So, yeah. So that’s, that’s the podcast story about how I kind of came live on podcasting. But, um..

Ron:

You have a very interesting history, from what I read online, and I asked you a little bit about it on the phone call. Yeah, you had some really good experiences when it comes you know, you, you and I have had similar paths the way that we’ve been very lucky to have these yes opportunities. Tell me about those opportunities and how you’ve been able to, like, capitalize on those.

Pam: 

Yeah, and I love that you talked about them as opportunities. So I, I, you know, I was great at math as a little kid, right? Memorized by facts, did all the things similar to how we talked about with you, right? And then I was putting the quote, unquote, Advanced Math classes through high school. And then I went to college, became a math major. Quickly, decided, not actually, not. Quickly, I was an English major. First, actually, as an English major for one semester. Then I realized I didn’t like writing papers anyway. Long story short, I ended up as a math major for like, a hot semester and a half until I realized this was not gonna go over well. I was in engineering college. It was heavy engineering, and I just was not doing well in these math classes. I was doing okay, but not okay enough to get out of there in four years. So quickly, I decided I’m going to change my major to education. My father, I was on the phone, actually had a pay phone with my father, so that tells my age, you know, really upset I’m not gonna graduate for like, six years. You know, the pay phone is and at this point, he’s like, my dad’s like, well, I don’t have he’s like, we’re at it. You know, you’ve used up your four years of funding. So at this point, if you stay in school, it’s on you, like, Oh my gosh. It’s like, so what about being a teacher? It’s like teachers make no money. But okay, I’ll try anyway. So long story short, I took a methods club, one like a one credit, I think, was like a methods class or something. It was during the winter session, and I walked into a high school. It was actually a high school math class, and I was like, I need to, I need to work with kids. And I also, they had us go into a charter school. They had us visiting all these schools, and I was watching kids learn math, and I thought, Oh, this is, this is what I want to do. So I became a teacher. I taught in but Well, the interesting So, the interesting thing is that every time I taught math throughout my career, I always felt like there was some connection to emotions in how right? Because, like, people don’t think of math being an emotional topic, yeah, no, no, tell me more. Okay, but, but every person, if that you talk to, not every person walking down the street, if you say to somebody, yeah, I’m a math teacher, the reaction is always like, Oh, you must. I get two reactions. One is, there was this one teacher who blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Somebody wants to, like, spill their guts. And the other one is, Oh, you must be really smart. And I’m like, I don’t know. I think it’s not, it’s just this stigma that we have around math, that it is this magical, mystical thing. And I think that the reason why people have those reactions is because it’s tied to the emotions that they were feeling in some moment when they were in a geometry class or an algebra class, or when they got their test back one day and they saw a grade or a star, or no star, or whatever it is, right? It could be a good memory. It could be a difficult memory. And our memories are all tied to emotions, so that’s what I started noticing, is my students were very like, emotionally charged when it came to math. But I don’t know that I was really, like, cognizant about I was like, I was noticing it, but I wasn’t allowing myself to feel it, experience it. I was like, Okay, we got to charge ahead. I’ve got 180 days to cover here. I’m just gonna go cover the math. 

Ron:

I love your passion about changing people’s mindsets and about their math identities, but tell me a time when you felt like your math identity or your math mindset was challenged.

Pam:

So I was about 11 years in, I think 10 or 11 years into my teaching career, and I changed jobs I had been previous to taking this new job. I taught in two pretty high end school districts, upper middle class school districts, and then I took a job in this third school that I worked in, and the students, it was a large population of marginalized students. And you know, I had all these years of experience under my belt. No problem, this is going to be a piece of cake, right? I walked into the building, and I did right away. They handed me the new shiny red textbooks, which I talked about in my podcast, shiny red testics. They were still in the shrink wrap, like we’ve got your new textbooks, right? Everything’s going to be okay. They increased instructional time. So okay, we’re giving you more instructional time than these kids had before we get shiny red textbooks. Everything’s gonna be fine. Sounds great. It was great, ideal, right? Brand new, like the school had just been renovated. Everything was shining. Oh, wow, clean. Yeah, my colleagues were really friendly. Everybody’s coming to greet me. And on the first day of school, I could hear the students thundering up the stairs. I was teaching eighth grade, and I had never taught eighth grade before. I taught up through seventh at this point in my career, and I could hear them coming up, and it didn’t sound like the first day of school to me for it right off the bat, right? Usually, the first day of school kids are excited to come back, but they’re not like thundering up the stairs and screaming and yelling, usually. And these kids came around the corner, and they took one look at me, standing there at my classroom door. I was in my like crisp suit, which I’d never wear a suit again to school. But anyway, I was wearing my suit, and their with an outstretched hand ready to shake their hands. And these kids are just pushing past me get into the classroom, making comments about what I was wearing, where they thought I was from right away. I knew there was, I actually get chills as I tell the story, because I thought, oh my gosh, these kids are judging me right before I’ve even opened my mouth. So I went into the classroom, got them settled down and started teaching. But, you know, today’s the problem of the day. I don’t know what I was doing. I don’t even remember. I was like, a blur, right? So at the same time, I was enrolled at graduate in graduate school to get my math, my master’s degree in math education. Okay? And so I was taking a class called Intro to Math Education, which is kind of funny because I’d already been teaching math for so many years, but this is part of the program, and the professor kept bringing these amazing like they call them now, low floor, high entry, sorry. Low floor high ceiling problems, low floor high ceiling problems, you know, critical thinking, really inquiry based learning to class. And throughout those nights, when I was at grad school class, they would say, you know, that my colleagues, my peers, would come back and tell stories about how they were doing these problems in their classroom with their students. And I just sat there kind of quietly and thought, I don’t have anything to share, because I could not get these kids to either pick up their heads off the desks. Listen to me. I mean, it was every day was a battle to get them to buy into what I was trying to sell them, right with the shiny red textbooks right open to page 41 was not what they were looking for. Which is really interesting because, side note, the job I had done for five years prior to this, I had taught out of a curriculum called Everyday Math, which is out of the University of Chicago, very inquiry based, very rich tasks and very different than what was being sold in these shiny red textbooks. The textbooks were, you know, very traditional where there’s three or four practice problems on one side, followed by 40 practice like exercises, I think they called them, and then maybe five or six word problems, which… Forget it. We weren’t even getting to those right. And so going back and forth to graduate school to class. And one night, I sat down with my professor after class, and I after everybody had left, and I said, “You know, I love all these tasks. I believe in them. I believe that students should be exposed to these tasks. But I do not think my students, I don’t believe my students can’t do it. Can’t do these problems.” And she looked at me, and she said that one sentence that will net that changed the trajectory of my career. She said, “If you don’t believe in your students, who will”

Ron:

Wow! That that’s an honest and genuine response. How did you respond to that call to action?

Pam:

So I went back into school, and I was brave, and I said, Okay, I’m gonna try some of these tasks. And they were, like, algebraic reasoning tasks, like the type the where you have, like, you know, certain number of shapes, like figure one, figure two, figure three, and the figures, right? Okay, so I bring these in. I’m asking the students questions like, Well, how do you know, how do you know? How did you get your answer? Convince me.  All of these types of questions, right? And one day, I’m walking down to the lunch room, or I was walking down to check my mailbox during my break during lunch period, and I see all of my students jammed into the main office, and it was sort of this, like glassed in main office. So of course, I was curious, right? What’s what’s going on? I had about 87 students, so it wasn’t all of them, but it was a large portion of them, and the principal was standing on the other side of the desk, and there are mad about something. So I walked in, and I said, what’s going on? And Mr. Nolan, who was the principal, said, why don’t you tell Mrs. Brett what’s going on? And the students turned around, they said, “You don’t know the math. You’re not teaching us.” And I said, Wait. They went “You’re not teaching us, because all you do is ask us why and how do we know? So you must not know the answers to problems. And I’m like, what so? And this is me coming off of years of asking kids, right when I was teaching everyday math, it was all about, how do you know? And can you prove your thinking and explain your reasoning. All of this? Right? So my tier principal, God bless him. He said, “Mrs. Brett is doing her job. Go to lunch.” And they went back to lunch. So that really having that administrative support was like gold, because I knew, I knew that I could be brave. At the same time, I was told by that district that I didn’t know this. When I got hired, I did not know this, but I had to, as the only eighth grade math teacher, I was charged with raising test scores. These test scores needed to go up 19%. If they didn’t go up 19% then the state was coming in, because we were, I forget what they called it back then, but it was like, It’s not called Early Warning. But there was, there was an acronym that I know what you’re talking about, right? And so if I if our, if we didn’t have test scores up by 19% by the end of that year, we were going to be required to be taken over by the state.

Ron:

How did you feel about that? Like, how did I mean you’re the your math teacher you’ve been again, this is another level of, you know, teaching, where you are now under this new stress. And so how did, like, how did you, how did you address it? How’d you deal with that?

Pam:

Oh, I almost quit. That’s another layer to the problem I brought when I tell you, I mean, there are a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of nights where I was like, I can’t I would say to my husband, I have 87 kids in my head right now, thinking, rethinking, rethinking during the day, and I know teachers do this all the time. You get home and you’re still thinking about a conversation you had, or an interaction with your hat with a student, or maybe it’s maybe you didn’t do the right problems. You thought you should have done more problems with the students, or whatever we overthink as teachers. That’s what you do., 

Ron:

Yes, you do. So you’re in this situation. What turned it around for you?

Pam:

You know, I’m a very determined person. Once I lean into something, I don’t give up. Something that did change was the superintendent walked in during my prep. Now, he didn’t just show up in people’s classrooms. He No, but he must have looked at the schedule. He knew when my prep was. He showed up in my room during my prep and he said, We know you’re ready to jump ship. What can we do to help you? And I said, Well, can I have some graphing calculators? Because I didn’t have any graphing. Yeah, I had Dollar Store calculators, and he said “Done.” So I had calculators by the end of the week. So that was number one. It wasn’t the calculators. It was being heard. It was right. It wasn’t that I needed the calculators that badly. It was like, okay, he’s sitting in my room. He’s asking me for whatever I want. So I’m like, I better ask for something really good. But on the other hand, it was more like the feeling of him knowing that I was struggling, and knowing that, you know, it’s, it’s part way through the year, it’s to replace a math teacher is practically impossible.

Ron:

Can I just frame this out just a little bit? 

Pam:

Yeah

Ron:

So you’re telling me that and that the superintendent came down. Now, superintendents are under a lot of pressure, building administrators under a lot of pressure, especially with these scores. And instead of like saying, “This has to get done,” He said, “How can I support you?”

Pam:

Yes, 

Ron:
That’s a powerful moment when the superintendent comes down from his office. You know when he starts asking you questions, elbow to elbow with you. And you felt heard, 

Pam:

Yeah. Yeah. That was huge. Oh, yeah, That was a huge that was huge. That superintendent also was amazing. He used to give us these little notes in our mailbox. It was, it was, it was hats off. It was, like a little monopoly, like a little monopoly, yeah, and it’s called hats off. And it would literally say, like, hats off. I saw your students doing X, Y, Z, or hats off. You know, it could be, I don’t even know. I’m sure I have them somewhere. I’m sorry I kept them. But, yeah, every once in a while you get something in your mailbox. He was very proactive about giving positive feedback and direct feedback. It was really good. 

Ron:

So were there any teacher moves that helped you to turn some things around? 

Pam:

I got frustrated with my students a lot because, you know. They would go home. They wouldn’t do their homework and come back like, Oh no, noone did their homework again, right? So then I would open my classroom in the afternoon. I didn’t have kids at the time, so they were my kids, right? And so I hope, and I know not a lot of teachers cannot do this, because they have other responsibilities outside, but in at that time in my life, I was willing to stay the extra time, and while I was cleaning up my room or whatever they were doing their homework. So you know, I think it was moments like that, like the after school times, where I started to see the human-ness of my students. 

Ron:

Yes, 

Pam:

And seeing how much I believed in them, but also, more importantly, how they started to believe in themselves. 

Ron:

Tell me more. You said you saw the humanness in them. What does that look like?

Pam:

You know? They’re eighth graders, so they’re looking like men and women at this point, you know, but they’re still such, I don’t want to say babies, but they’re just, they’re somebody’s child. You know, it’s somebody’s child. And that these were, these are human beings, right? They have emotions, they have feelings. And a lot of their tough exterior comes from, stems from the fact that they have not been seen. So similar to how that principal, or the superintendent, and the principal, right? The principal saw me. The superintendent saw me. So then I felt. So I felt compassion towards me as a teacher. So therefore that compassion, I mean, I’m a compassionate person to begin with, but that, that’s what I started to really see, is that these kids, like my professor said, If I don’t believe in them, who will, because the other piece of the story is my well meaning, my well meaning colleagues, they’re trying to make me feel better. They said things to me like, just get through the year. Pam, next year’s group will be better. It’s still 87 or whatever. Humans, yeah, that deserve an education just as much as those next those kids in seventh grade are coming up. Umm.

Ron:

So what I hear you saying, it wasn’t the shiny new textbooks, it wasn’t the brand new school. It wasn’t, you know, the clean suit you wore, the polished look you had. It was sitting down elbow to elbow with them and hearing them.

Pam:

Yes. Yes. So two things. One, I did take the textbooks away. After my after my professor said, If you don’t believe in them, who will I took them away. I put them on I put them on the bookshelf. We’re done with those. I made up my own curriculum. But luckily, I could. I had the freedom and the flexibility. The administration trusted me to do whatever I needed to do. And they saw things happening. They saw students picking their heads up off the desk. They saw kids coming to class on time. They saw behaviors shifting. They saw kids wanting to come to my class. And so when they started to see that, nobody really gave me a hard time about what I was teaching, or when I was teaching what or what the objective was on the board. Yes, did I have an objective on the board every day? I did, but I was, I was really, it was ebb and flow with these students who really, I mean, I had kids arguing with me to the death that 1/4 was the same thing as a 0.14 and I’m like, Okay, we’re in eighth grade. We got to move on from that, right? But it was because nobody had ever modeled. They had never had opportunities to model or see or visualize or really think they had not been asked to think. And when I started realizing these kids really had not been given the opportunity to think, and the reason why I knew that was because of how they challenged me thinking that I didn’t know how to do the math. 

Ron:

Yes, 

Pam:

Right? So they’re like nobody teachers are not supposed to ask that they’re there. They believe that my job was to tell them what to do, and it was their job to copy down what I was telling them.

Ron:

And that’s how they got that far. That’s how they got, you know, through each of the grade levels. And again, people doing the best they can. But it took somebody who, you know, kind of like, sat down and listened and was this process, you know, we’re talking on a podcast, and just like a television show, the happy ending happens in 30 minutes. But this process that you’re talking about, how long did it take? 

Pam:

So to turn this around? Great question. Really, I think it was around Valentine’s Day. And the reason why I just remember they came back from winter break. They were happy to see me, all right? And I think part of that is they have tough things going on at home. Some of them have very loving homes, but some of them, they’re not going on vacation to some trip somewhere, they get to come back and tell the story like they’re home and or they’re working, or they’re taking care of little siblings and cousins and right? So they were happy to see you, and they came back from break, and then about that point, they knew the drill. They knew that Mrs. Brett was gonna ask them why. They knew. They knew the expectations. They knew that I was not going to just let them just kind of do whatever they wanted to do. It was tough. You know, even though I’m very compassionate, I’m compassionate with, like, sort of a tough love. 

Ron:
You’re telling me some pieces of your recipe here, and two of the ingredients, the biggest ingredient there is that high expectations. Yeah, the high expectations piece, I see more and more research, you know, if we believe, like your professor said, if you know, if we let’s put it in a positive like, You need to believe, if you believe, they’ll believe. 

Pam:

Yes. 

Ron:

So we need to keep them at a high expectation and not keep lowering the bar. Like, oh, these poor babies. Like, no, they’re going, they’re gonna leave me one day. I got 180 days to teach them. Like, let’s keep the bar high, and that’s what you’re doing. 

Pam:

Yeah, and I was saying, and I said things to them, this is, by the way, this was 2004 so this is was a long time ago. So basically, I closed my door one day. I was frustrated with them. I was frustrated with the fact that they had not crowded their homework or whatever, they had not done that. I was really like, annoyed. I’m like, we can’t move on to the next thing because we’re we have, I need this other piece of something that I needed. And I said to them, you know, guys, I don’t teach math because I just need a paycheck. I said I was, like, in my mind, I’m like, I’m gonna get fired for saying this. But I said, like, I teach math for social justice, because I believe that every single kid deserves to have to be able to think through a problem. Yes, no matter what, no matter what the color of your skin is or what type of home you go home to at night, everybody needs to be able to learn how to think and think logically, like you were saying earlier in another conversation. You know, I had like, this whole logical thinking, the problem solving, the being able to see a problem that you’ve never solved before and think, Okay, I have some tools that I can do, that I can pull out to do this, to solve this problem. And it’s a life skill, right? It doesn’t mean that you’re solving like a Pythagorean theme problem. It’s like changing a tire. Never change a tire. Boy. You should kind of keep this logical thinking, which is what we learned in math, which those muscles get worked and developed in math class. And so I said that to them, and I think that that made them sit up. And I said, and then I said, when we go to the height when we go out into the world, right? What do people think? And they said that we were dumb and we can’t do it like, Okay? And is that true? And I said, No. I said, Okay, so what are we going to do about it? 

Ron:

You saw them. You saw them, and you saw them as worthy.

Pam:

Show the world that you are worthy, because you show the world that you have knowledge to bring right? So I just was talking to one of my former students the other day, and she was working for the Department of Justice, when I did have a conversation with her, and she said, you know, over and over and over again, she had that in that conversation, in her mind, that you know, the world is gonna look differently at certain people, and that sucks, and we don’t want that. But also, she has so much to give. So no, not to play small, like not to play small,

Ron:

Not to play small. I love that you have a passion about, you know, making sure, attending to those emotions, attending to like the whole child when as they approach mathematics and finding them worthy. You now work with teachers to support this work. You’re paying it forward. 

Pam:

Yeah. 

Ron:

What are your biggest messages to teachers to continue this message to keep those high expectations and to make sure they understand that, that they show the kids are worthy. 

Pam:

Okay, boy, this is a good one. So I think it comes back to the whole idea of beliefs, right? And I think that we, we, we come to each space, whether it’s we’re t you know, teaching, as a teacher or as a learner, with this belief about ourselves, about the topic, about the other person, this relational belief, and giving teachers the opportunity to see the brilliance in their students. Because a lot of times I will walk into classrooms and teachers kind of like, shake their hands a little, you know, they don’t know their facts, or they don’t.

Ron:

They come to you with, what, with what they don’t know? Y

Pam:

Yeah, yeah. And that’s, and that’s, you know, it’s just some, I want to say it’s, it’s not a bad thing. It’s just, it’s what we…

Ron:

It’s human. 

Pam:

It’s human, exactly, thank you. As human, it, you know, we are we as humans, we are wired to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Yes? And so we go right to we have this negativity bias, right, because we’re right. And so this negativity bias leads us to, you know, they don’t know the facts. They can’t solve world problems, right? So I always ask, Well, let’s look at what they can do, right? And so that’s where, that’s where I start with teachers, what? What can they do? So let’s start with, one of the easiest lists I start with is number talks, right? Let’s start with a number talk. And always, every single time I bring a number talk into a classroom to teachers will are amazed like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know that they knew fractions, right? I’ll be in a third grade class, and I’ll ask students, you know, the answer is, five. What did I do to get there? Now, that’s a really easy question, right? But students will start to say, Well, can I use fractions? Can I say two and a half plus two and a half? And then teachers like, but we didn’t teach mixed numbers yet. I’m like, right? But your students understand two and a half at some level, right? So at some level, so brilliant, exactly. So that’s what I do. I try to give teachers the opportunity to see their students as math learners, and see what they’re bringing to the table. And then what can we do to build up of what they already know,

Ron:

You just talked about how they come with the list of what they can’t do, what ways can schools help teachers to overcome these barriers?

Pam:

Okay, so the first thing is that students and teachers need to be doing math, so giving teachers the opportunity to connect with other educators and literally sit in the seat of the problem solver. That’s the first thing to experience what it feels like to do math. And I’m not saying every at every PLC or every prep, but they should feel like they know what it feels like to be a math problem solver. And when I say like sitting in the seat of the problem solver, I’m talking about inquiry based, like critical thinking type task, like a rich task, not just like, what is three times seven equals 21 right? So that’s the first thing. And I think the other thing is understanding that it’s a continual growth. There’s no teacher, including myself. I’ve been in this field for 25 years, has ever fully cooked, because you always have new kids coming in. You always have new challenges, and to recognize that those challenges are going to come right there’s not, they’re not going to go away, and just to be there, to be supportive and compassionate to the continued growth of teachers and provide that professional learning space, whether it’s bringing in a consultant or a coach, or just giving the teachers time to grapple with mathematical problems and then talk about, okay, now, what does that? What are the implications for that when we go in and teach.

Ron:

Oh, awesome. Okay, I want to know you’ve interviewed quite a few people. And I don’t want to say favorite, who’s your favorite, but who is no the tell me a favorite moment from your podcast, because that’s the fun stuff

Pam:

Alright. So that’s, that’s an easy one without and everybody okay, so Dan Meyer came to my podcast wearing blue glasses, which I forgot that he had actually worn blue glasses. And then I was like, Oh my gosh, does he think that I copied off them? No, he was just being a good sport. I forgot he was wearing blue glasses on his podcast. But I don’t know why. I don’t know the reason why, you know the reason why he was wearing blue glasses on his podcast? But the reason why I thought it was funny is because there were, there were pretend, fake glasses. They were like, cover that part, right? And he, like, dug them out of his kids toy box just before he went live. And I just thought the effort that he put in was great, because I’m following him for a long time.

Ron:

Why the blue glasses?

Pam:

Okay, so Amanda Jansen, who wrote rough draft math, she and I have connected on other projects before, and so I was speaking at a conference I had I was trying to get people to come to my session. It was my Twitter when Twitter was hot, right? Twitter, yeah, the conference I was at, and we had hashtags and whatever. So I went, and I pulled my phone out and I took a selfie of me wearing these glasses, and Amanda commented, love the glasses. So that was so a year went by after that conference, and I was on, I wish I had the note. I don’t have it on my I’m looking on my bulletin board. I had a colleague that I was working with who was helping with some of my, like, it was a different project, but he’s helping with graphics and things like that. He said, love the blue glasses. So he and I retired. Like, if I ever had a podcast, I had, like, math for humans, I had all these

Ron: 

Right. I got, I did,all the naming searches.

Pam:

Right. And then I was like, he’s like, I think it’s, I don’t know if he said it or I said it, or Bill kind of said at the same time. Was like, Blue Glasses Math. It’s about shifting your perspective on what it means to be a math person. Because when I talk …to bring it full circle…. When I talk to people, my cousins, the lady at the deli counter, I don’t know anybody, “Oh, you teach math. Oh, my gosh.” You know all these comments about it, and I’m like, That’s just because it’s their perspective. Because that’s not what math is about, right? It’s not about this inaccessible holy grail that people have, that people shouldn’t have access to. Everybody should have access to math, right? Thinking about the universal design, right? Everybody should have access, and that is what takes my full circle back to those students, is like they deserved it. I wasn’t not going to just push them along like I was being told, you know, Just push them along until so that you don’t lose your mind, right? It was like, no, no, I’m going to pull it together. They’re going to pull it together, and we’re going to get through this. Because every human deserves to have an opportunity to see themselves as a math person, or somebody who’s capable of sitting at the mathematical table.

Ron:

You know what? That was awesome.I think that’s a great way to end the podcast. Pam, I want to thank you so much for being on the math universally speaking podcast, I have thoroughly enjoyed speaking with you both on the phone and during the podcasting. Thanks for doing this podcast, swap, because we’re going to be on each other’s podcast. 

Pam:

Yes. 

Ron:

And so, this is such a fun project. And I’m Pam I hope you reach out again I would love to do another project with you sometime soon 

Pam:

100%. Thanks, Ron! Thanks for having me. 

Ron:

You take care. 

Pam:

Okay. Thanks. You too.