Jon Orr: Hey there, Math Moment Makers. Kyle and Jon here. We are starting this episode off a little bit differently, and actually we are completely reshuffling our episode order as we attempt to honor the lives of George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Ahmaud Arbery, and many other black lives that have been taken too soon, and all in the name of racism.

Kyle Pearce: We thought about not releasing an episode this week, because two white guys who love teaching math really have no business speaking about these horrible events that have taken place recently and unfortunately take place consistently due to the state of systemic racism and oppression that the black community lives with and in each and every single day. However, we knew that staying silent doesn’t help.

Jon Orr: It might be a sign of not being a racist, but it certainly doesn’t help us share what we need to be, which is anti-racist.

Kyle Pearce: So rather than staying silent this week, we thought it would be better to take this opportunity to amplify the voices of those who we, the white community, can listen and learn from. Today we’re going to go straight into our episode so we can talk less and listen more.

Jon Orr: Today we’re going to listen and learn from Hema Khodai, an educator who lives relatively close to Kyle and I in Mississauga, Ontario. Hema is a high school math teacher turned instructional resource teacher. We speak with Hema today about who are mathematicians, how relationships help build or wreck a student’s ability to identify as mathematicians, why it’s so important that we educators know our why, and how math has to be a community endeavor.

Kyle Pearce: We are excited to share Hema’s voice with the Math Moment Maker community. Here we go.

Jon Orr: Hey there, Hema. Welcome to the Making Math Moments That Matter Podcast. We are so excited to have you on the show today in this kind of quarantine era. How are you doing with the pandemic and everything?

Hema Khodai: I’m really excited to be here talking to the two of you today. It’s sort of the most normal thing I’ve done in a while, and it’s the most connection I’ve had to my math community in a while, with all the conferences being canceled. So this is just a really great opportunity to check back in with my passions and my community and help ground me a little bit in this ever-changing scenario of the global pandemic.

Kyle Pearce: Absolutely. Absolutely. I know for myself, and I think Jon can relate as well, not having travel time to work, and I’m trying to look at some of the bright side of things. It’s definitely harder, I find, to stay focused. I have two young children. Jon has three children at home, so trying to balance all of those things is definitely a challenge, but there are definitely some benefits as well, saving that travel time, and I feel like I’m running my lifestyle in less of a rush. So I’m going to look at those as positives.

Kyle Pearce: But you know what, Hema, let’s dive in here. Our listeners are wondering, and they want to know a little bit more about yourself. I’m sure there are many who are listening in who may have been a part of our Virtual Summit, and they may recognize your name from that as well as your session, which we’re going to talk about today. But for those who may not be as familiar with Hema, what is your story, where are you located, and how did you get into this teaching gig?

Hema Khodai: So I’m Hena Khodai. I am a high school teacher in the Peel region. I work and live on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nations, and I have been teaching for about 12 years, and the last two years, I’m in an instructional resource teacher role supporting K to 12 math education. That’s sort of the professional aspect.

Hema Khodai: How did I get into teaching? I don’t really remember. It’s always been about wanting to work with children, and my earliest memory of wanting to work with children was I wanted to be a pediatrician and help them feel better, and take care of them. So it’s sort of those very early urges of really wanting to connect with children. And then you discover blood, and it’s like, “No, I don’t want to do this.” [crosstalk 00:04:27].

Kyle Pearce: If you’re anything like me, I hit the floor when I see the blood. So teaching it is, for helping other people.

Hema Khodai: [crosstalk 00:04:36]. Little did I know there was also blood in those situations.

Jon Orr: Yeah. Can be. Can be.

Hema Khodai: I teach high school, so it’s really the math moments, and I know you’re going to ask about that, so I’m just going to start talking about it. It’s those memorable math moments that just click along the way, and all of a sudden you find yourself in second year of university applying for a consecutive … Sorry, not consecutive, a concurrent education program. And it was the pre-service experiences that just really consolidated that I wanted to be not just in teaching, but teaching mathematics specifically.

Jon Orr: That last comment there really hits home for me too. I come from a family of teachers, so I had known that kind of lifestyle, I had known what that job could look like, and I thought I might want to go into teaching, and I wasn’t sure, and I changed my mind. And it wasn’t until, like you just said, some of the pre-service experiences, and it was actually even before that for me, that I had a co-op job actually pretty close to where you live, just outside of Mississauga, in Waterloo.

Jon Orr: And in that co-op job, I tutored math for college kids, and it was the one on one interaction with kids and learning, and specifically about math, that really solidified that decision for me, kind of like what you’d said about solidifying, those interactions are what kind of sold you on it, and it sold me on it. Because my dad was a math teacher, and a very traditional math teacher, my dad is, and I was like, “I don’t know if I want to go into that.” But it was really those interactions with kids and learning that changed my direction to focus on that. And for me, in university, it was you had to apply into that program after a few years in university, so that made me switch into those gears. I totally understand.

Jon Orr: I’m wondering if we can get a little background into, you kind of mentioned that kind of a memorable math moment, but I’m wondering as a student, before that, did you have any sort of memorable math moments when you were younger? When we say math class, I know that stuff pops into my mind about when I was a student and a kid and experiencing masth for some of the first times. Can you tell us about one of those?

Hema Khodai: Yes, absolutely. I’ve got this huge smile on my face, because it’s such a vivid memory for me. It’s sort of a cold, wintry day, and I’m in the back of the car, and my family is driving home after having visited with family, and I can feel my finger on the window in the condensation, drawing out fractions. I must have been maybe nine or 10, grade four, grade five, and I was just so excited about fractions. It annoyed everybody around me, because all I wanted to do was show them pictures of fractions and show them what they could do with fractions, and it was my sort of first moment of real curiosity about math.

Hema Khodai: It wasn’t just adding numbers or sorting numbers, ordering them, it was something new. It was something that I hadn’t thought about before, and it was … Now I have a name for it. It was play, but in the moment it was a total spark, and I was so curious about it, but then that evolved into my next real big moment, that again, I can remember vividly, is not a moment of curiosity. It’s a moment of resistance, and it was grade nine advanced math class, in the basement of a 100 year old building with a teacher who wrote in my report card that I talked too much.

Jon Orr: You were a social butterfly.

Kyle Pearce: That was the descriptive feedback you had received?

Hema Khodai: Yes. I talk too much in math class. And so of course you had-

Kyle Pearce: “Talk too much.” There’s no talking in math class.

Hema Khodai: Yes. Absolutely none. Please don’t. Cease and desist, right away.

Kyle Pearce: Right.

Hema Khodai: So I brought the report card home to my dad and I thought, “Oh, this is so embarrassing. My spotless record, here it goes, in grade nine math.” And I remember my dad just reading the comment and he had this sort of proud look on his face. And he said, “So when exactly is it that you’re doing all this talking and who is it with?” That meant a lot, because he normalized that it’s okay to talk in math class, and he normalized that it’s good to talk to other kids about math, and that we were learning through talk. And that long before I knew the term mathematical discourse, that that was a thing, and that it was a necessary thing for my learning, and for the learning that my peers were engaging in. So that’s sort of my moment of resistance, where I was like, “You cannot make me be quiet in math class. It’s not going to happen.”

Kyle Pearce: Well, you know, what I really like about your moments that you’re sharing with us is there’s kind of a little bit of both sides of the coin there, and sometimes people come in and they either have a really positive experience, and oftentimes that positive experience has sort of driven them to carry on and do the things that they’re doing in math education, and then there’s also some people that come in with sort of that negative memory, and maybe in spite of that negative memory, it’s like they’re going to go and do good things in math education. And you found a way to look at and see that there were positive moments for all of us, and there were maybe even some not so positive moments for all of us.

Kyle Pearce: The part that I think is really interesting is being able to reflect on that learning of fractions at a pretty young age, and maybe back then, you didn’t know that it was play, that curiosity, that interest in how things work, but there is something in us that just drives us to want to keep exploring and trying to hang on to that, I think is so important. And then on the flip side, taking your grade nine experience and being able to reflect on that and think that of course there are times when we need to be active listeners in a math classroom. However, that isn’t for 100% of the time. We need kids to be interacting with one another and constructing their learning together.

Kyle Pearce: So I really like your moment that you’ve shared with us and the Math Moment Maker community, and I’ve got to assume that your experiences have led you down this path for education, for math education in particular, and we want to shift our talk here to something particular from our Virtual Summit, which was your presentation titled, “Who is a Mathematician?” And we were really excited to have you as a part of the Virtual Math Summit, but now also to be able to bring you into the audio format so that we can unpack some of the big ideas of your talk. So I’m wondering, for those listening and who did not have the opportunity to dive in last November, what would be your elevator pitch for, “Who is a Mathematician?” What would be your synopsis, your snapshot of the talk?

Hema Khodai: So I’m really feeling like November was an entire lifetime ago, and-

Kyle Pearce: Which it basically was. Yeah.

Hema Khodai: Right? It’s a whole different era, and so I think my thoughts on, “Who is a mathematician?” Have grown a bit, and my very quick synopsis would be, anyone who wants to be can be a mathematician, given the right supports, resources, and folks to believe in them.

Kyle Pearce: So true. So true.

Jon Orr: I’ll admit that, and listeners of this podcast know that me, being a very traditional teacher, used to not to take into those considerations about mathematicians. It was like I was the teacher that was probably just like my dad, who was a teacher, who probably was just like all my teachers, that there were math people and there were not math people. And if you weren’t, you weren’t, and you could never be one. And if you were late to class, I gave you heck for it, and I didn’t even care about the reason, because if you were going to be a good student, you needed to be there on time. And if you missed class, I would even give you heck when you came back.

Jon Orr: And when I look back on that self of mine, I taught like that for a number of years, and I want to shake that teacher of mine, that, “You’re giving kids heck for being late, but you don’t know the reason, and you’re not thinking about the supports that they had or need to be successful in those classes. You’re not thinking about kids.” That’s when I reflect on myself, I didn’t think about the kids themselves. I thought about math, and I was there to talk about how to learn math, and it was really procedural math.

Jon Orr: So I really enjoyed your session, and I know a lot of teachers did. We got a lot of comments on your session, and there was a lot of chatter on Twitter, and you made that evident in your session about tagging you and keeping the conversation going, so we really appreciated that part of your session. And I’m wondering if we dive into the little pieces of the session, like you talked about building those relationships, and if we think specifically about that, I wasn’t doing that as a teacher, and I know there are some teachers out there that are still not doing that. And how do we help build those relationships, and how do those relationships build students’ identity to math, but also how do those relationships wreck students’ identity to math in your opinion?

Hema Khodai: I just want to say how much I appreciate you very authentically articulating what I think a lot of teachers have lived, which is this is what my structures were growing up and learning math, and this is what I replicated for, I would say, almost the first decade of my career. And as I’m listening to you, I’m reflecting on my own moments. I identified the math moment that was memorable in terms of curiosity in grade three, and resistance in grade nine, and that real moment of power in pre-service when I had a grade seven student, just he was in tears with gratitude that I had stopped mid-lesson to answer his question. But somewhere along the way, those moments of curiosity and power fell to the wayside, and I adopted all the structures that were just in place, sort of very uncritically.

Hema Khodai: And it hasn’t been until the last two years that I’m resurfacing those memories and saying, “What happened to that? What happened to that really powerful experience? And why am I not creating that for the children in my classrooms? Why has my relationship with math teaching taken precedent over our relationship as a mathematical community of learners? Like, where along the way did I just get swept up with understanding curriculum, meeting curriculum expectations, this whole notion of classroom management?” I hate that term, because it’s not about relationships and I am not a manager, if I am only focused on classroom management. So I have engaged in some really, really oppressive practices, and that’s hard to sit with. That is very, very uncomfortable to say out loud, but it’s this idea of, “Is it really about the kids? When has it really been about the kids? How do I make it about the kids?”

Kyle Pearce: You bring up so many thoughts in my mind about so many of the struggles we have in education in general, but also particularly in mathematics, around access and equity. It’s so easy for us as humans to just walk into how things have always happened, and not to be reflective on them. And I know I am definitely guilty of it, and I know Jon and I, we’ve said it on previous episodes, that that’s a huge area of reflection for both of us, that we’re trying to be much more aware of the things we do daily in the math classroom, outside the math classroom, that we have just always done and have never thought about, and it hasn’t impacted us personally. And that is something that I think will be a continuous growth area for us and for everyone out there, to be aware of these things.

Kyle Pearce: And when we come into a math classroom as a pre-service teacher, going back to your pre-service story, and Jon’s reflection on the pre-service experience he had, where you’re coming in, and you’re just trying to do a “good job,” and I’m using those quotation marks because we don’t know what a good job looks like back then. We’re trying to emulate what we’re seeing, and oftentimes that perpetuates some not great things, because we’re not reflecting on them. We’re not thinking critically about them.

Kyle Pearce: So I think this flows into a next part of your session that I’m really curious about, because you really emphasize this idea of educators knowing our why, and what is a why? And when I watched that portion of your presentation, I couldn’t help but remember the Simon Sinek book, Know Your Why, or Start With Why, I think it is, I should say. I think I just butchered the title, and it is so important because of these ideas that you’re sharing. So help us understand, why do you see knowing our why as teachers as being so important?

Hema Khodai: I think it kind of tracks back to, I think it was Jon’s comment about, we started teaching sort of for the love of math. And when the discipline is centered over the students being centered, that is a very different practice. So when we talk about culturally responsive pedagogy, we talk about equity, we talk about access, it’s not to the discipline and materials and resources necessarily. It’s access to someone who believes in your ability to learn and grow. The mathematical identity piece for me is secondary to that. I have to believe in your whole humanity as an entire being. That is exactly what it needs to be, because otherwise it’s very easy for me to impose on a student, their family, their community, deficit mindsets about why they are not learning as I wish for them to learn, as I want them to learn, as I have structured their learning to be. It is really not responsive at all.

Hema Khodai: So I think it is very critical to be able to articulate your why, but also to revisit it very often. My why has changed, I don’t know, within the day sometimes, from, “In this moment, I just need to get you ready for this unit test,” to, “Wait, everybody catch a breath, including myself. Why are we here? What’s the big picture?” And sort of just really disrupting the structures that we’ve inherited and the systems that we’ve inherited. And Kyle, to what you were saying, that sort of disruption takes an admission of power, but it also takes huge energy to constantly and continually look for what’s not working in terms of, “What is not building our students up? What are oppressive practices?” And not just identify it, but then the mental work of problem solving creatively within the structures that we’ve inherited. So if you don’t have a very clear why as to why you do the work that you do with other people’s children, I think the chances of causing harm are very real.

Jon Orr: Totally. When you make these comments, I see a lot of parallels. We talk all the time about lesson planning and lesson design, and we talk about, “You need to know,” or before I start with that, lots of teachers will ask Kyle and I in our forums, in the academy, and also online, they’re saying, “How do you pick what resource is the best to use in this lesson?” And we always resort back to saying, “Well, what is the learning goal that you want to give to your students?” And so we talk about that.

Jon Orr: That’s a parallel to the knowing your why as a teacher, because not only do you want to know what learning goal for that day, but if you can’t articulate what you value in education, and what are your goals, and what are the things that kind of define you as a teacher, what are the things that you want to instill in your students? We have to ask ourselves those bigger questions so that then when you go to the learning goal, you can articulate the learning goal, but also build in the things that you really value in teaching mathematics and learning mathematics, and it comes down to not only the things you value about the students themselves and how they learn, but also, what are the structures that you want to put into place to allow students the access to learn and the ability to engage with you and their peers?

Jon Orr: And there’s so much to think about when you think about math education, and some people just say, “Math is math. We’re just going to teach math. What else is there to think about?” Or, “You just show them how to do stuff.” And there is so much more to think about in terms of math education, and I think you really nailed it. I think to say, “What is your why? What is it that you really want to show to the students?” Because they’re going to know, soon as you walk into that door and you start talking and you start your math lesson on day one, they’re going to know what your why is, because they’re going to read that, and if they don’t think it’s about them, then you’ve lost them right off the bat.

Hema Khodai: That’s a perfect point right there. If your why isn’t student-centered, for example, if your why is, “I really want you to understand polynomial functions,” there’s another why behind that. “Why on earth do you really want me to understand polynomial functions?”

Jon Orr: Because they’re the best.

Hema Khodai: I would take that. I really would. [crosstalk 00:22:12], but it’s that depth to, “Hey, Kyle has this huge passion for them.” And that engages me, that sparks the curiosity, and we all have those moments. I’ve had classes just looking at me like, “Miss, why are you so excited about this?” I’m like, “Guys, just bear with me. This is so much fun.” But they will, they will totally bear with you, because they know you are geeking out about it. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but you’ve got to know, why are you doing it? What is it you’re trying to transfer to them, in terms of, is it play? Is it joy? Is it just a spirit of adventure in trying something mathematical?

Jon Orr: It’s also about community, and that theme came up in your presentation. And also, it reminded me of the blog post you wrote on your blog, “It Takes a Community.” And you wrote a specific phrase that I highlighted and pointed out, and I wanted to chat with you about. You wrote that, “How can a fractured educator …” So this is kind of relating back to the why. If you don’t know your why, you’re not, say, whole yet. But you wrote, “How can a fractured educator teach a whole student?” I wonder if you can elaborate on that phrase for us here on the podcast.

Hema Khodai: The first time I said that phrase out loud, it sort of startled me, because it was the first time that I was admitting out loud that I didn’t feel that my whole self was welcomed in educational spaces. And that had me thinking about, if there are parts of my identity, my story that I don’t consider, that doesn’t mean that those parts aren’t influencing my why, that they’re not influencing the decisions I make in my day to day interaction with students, in how I develop relationships with them, in how I support their mathematical identity and their mathematical agency. They sort of become vulnerable spots that don’t get addressed. So I think when there are practices in our teaching or our learning that don’t sit right with us, it’s because there are parts of our identity that we haven’t really grappled with.

Hema Khodai: I’m going to make a connection to COVID here. When I was a child, we had to leave my homeland because of a civil war, and we lived in refugee camps. Not for a very long time. I don’t remember them all that well, but it made me think that my formal education was disrupted. It was interrupted. There are gaps in it, but I had never thought of that before. In my own teaching, I have never leveraged the strength of that experience to connect to students who are currently living in that situation.

Hema Khodai: So when we pick pieces of our identity, as opposed to considering ourselves as whole educators, we only see pieces of our students, and we don’t accept them for their whole selves. And then it’s easy to say things like, “Well, I teach math. It doesn’t matter why the student is late. It doesn’t matter why they missed my very important unit test.” And that’s where relationships break apart, and that’s where we lose students too. They don’t feel part of the community. They don’t feel cared for. There is no opportunity to restore them back into the community, and that’s very, very damaging to emerging mathematical identities.

Kyle Pearce: Something that just resonated with me is just this idea that I’m picturing, constantly thinking through my own perspective. And for many years, I don’t know if they ever were a part of the community. So when we say, when we lose a student, we use that term so often. “Lose student?” We never found that student, right?

Hema Khodai: Right.

Kyle Pearce: And I think that is such, to me, a big takeaway from this conversation. Jon and I are always saying how selfish we are doing these podcasts, because we get the most learning, we believe, being able to engage with so many different people in math education, and hearing different perspectives, and really having us think about the questioning, and then where the conversation goes. And for me, that’s a big one, and I know that I definitely was a fractured educator for many years. I don’t know if I knew I was searching for that why. I think I was trying to search for how to be a good math teacher. That’s the job I picked. I loved kids, so I knew these things, but that’s 5,000 feet, right? Or 30,000 feet from the ground. That’s very high level thinking, right? “I care about kids and I want them to be successful in math,” for there’s some obvious reasons why, but getting closer to surface level, I think is so important. And I bet you those at home are having a very similar sort of self-reflection right now.

Kyle Pearce: So I’m wondering, do you have any maybe suggestions? I hate the word “advice,” but maybe things for people to think about from the Math Moment Maker community to help them put those pieces together? I think we’ll never be fully whole. If you think you have all the pieces together, then I think that’s when reflection stops and growth stops. So how do you help people find more of those pieces to make themselves more whole and less fractured as math educators?

Hema Khodai: I think I can offer my own reflections, not anywhere near where I can offer advice, but my reflections on this, it’s exactly what you said, Kyle. It’s there’s something in you that keeps you striving, and the striving could be a very technical aspect of your identity as an educator. You know, “How do you do this one thing better?” Or it could be a very sort of holistic striving. “Why have I not yet created community with this particular student or this group of students? Are there communities that I don’t hold space for in my teaching?”

Hema Khodai: And these are big questions, and they’re not meant to be answered sort of on the fly with checklists, but it’s this continual striving for, “How do I serve children? Whose children do I serve? How do I serve them? Where can I do more?” And it’s not meant to be in a monologue either, right? Got to be a dialogue. At some point, you have to have the fortitude to ask your students how well you’ve served them, and invite that feedback. And the one piece we haven’t talked at all about yet is the partnership with parents, and caregivers, and communities. Do they see you as a part of their community? And I think that’s critical. That’s critical to develop before you can say, “I have served children. I have taught the math. I have grown little mathematicians. I did that.” It doesn’t get done alone.

Jon Orr: Yeah. That’s so true, and these are big questions. These are really important questions to ask yourself about your teaching, and putting those pieces together. I think we should all reflect on these things, and I reflect for sure in this time. Right now, this is an important time to do that too. And just because we’re not in class right now with our students doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be thinking about these questions while we’re interacting online, or how you’re choosing to interact with your students. I think it is super important to do that.

Jon Orr: Think about these questions now, and we’ve talked about in our live Q&A sessions with teachers about, “How do I teach online?” And we’ve been saying, “The first thing you need to do is almost think you have to rebuild the community you have in your classroom.” And you can’t do that, like you just said, you can’t do that, especially now, without thinking about parents, without thinking about the community that is around them, because that’s where they are. That’s who they’re relying on right now, and we have to make sure that we’re reaching out to the groups, the families, so that we can understand what our students are going through, because right now, you probably don’t, and I don’t, unless I talk to my kids and establish that relationship again.

Jon Orr: It’s almost like, even if you had a great relationship beforehand, I think you’re going to have to go, “Hey, I have to reestablish this, because this is a whole new situation right now.” And I think thinking about that, almost going back to, “This is day one. We’re starting this school year over again,” because the kids aren’t used to this, and I think you’ve given us some really great tips to think about for not only knowing your why, but knowing who we’re working with on a daily basis and why that’s important, and why that’s going to be important for math education. So we definitely thank you for that. I think those are some really great tips. Just having that awareness, these things that you’ve given us is super important for educators, and I hope everyone listening here is taking this to heart, because I think that awareness is going to help you. There’s no wrong way to, I think, to do it, as long as you know of what you should be looking for, and I think you’ve provided that here for us, Hema.

Jon Orr: Looking at the time here, we’re going to start to wrap up. But Hema, usually what we ask our guests near the end of the episode is where they can learn more about you, how they can, say, get ahold of you if you wanted them to, where they could learn more about what you’ve written. Would you mind sharing a little bit about that, your contact info? Don’t give us your phone number or anything.

Kyle Pearce: Unless you want to.

Jon Orr: Unless you’re ready for calls.

Kyle Pearce: Unless you want to. Sometimes people are lonely. Social distancing is in full effect and people want to chat, so it’s fine.

Hema Khodai: I’m on Twitter a lot. My handle is @HKhodai. I do have a website where I blog very sporadically and it’s hemakhodai.com.

Kyle Pearce: Well, Hema, we have had a pleasure being able to have this conversation with you. Jon and I have invited many different guests on. We’ve seen some presentations live or we’ve seen them digitally, like we’ve seen your presentation at the Virtual Summit digitally. And every time we bring people on, you would think that we’d already know the story, but we never do. We always feel like we’re walking away with something new. So thank you so much for giving us those nuggets, and the Math Moment Maker community, all of that wonderful, wonderful thinking for them to reflect on. We want to wish you a fantastic day. It’s a Wednesday as we record this. Be safe, stay safe and healthy with your family, and we hope to see you at an upcoming either live or digital math event sometime soon.

Hema Khodai: Thank you so much for this opportunity. It’s been my pleasure to unpack sort of a lot of my own experience and memories with you, and you’ve helped me remember some things that have sort of whiskered away, and you’ve brought them back to the forefront for me. So I appreciate that. I appreciate what you do for this community.

Jon Orr: You also brought back those memories for us and made us think, so thank you for that. And we hope you enjoy the rest of your day and your time before we get back to the classroom. Take care.

Kyle Pearce: We want to thank Hema again for spending some time with us to share her ideas and insights with us and you, the Math Moment Maker community.

Jon Orr: Show notes and links to resources from this episode can be found at makemathmoments.com/episode80. Again, that’s makemathmoments.com/episode80.

Kyle Pearce: Thanks for listening. We look forward to learning with you again next week.