Tracy invites you on a journey through this most magnificent book of stories and portraits…This book turns on its head the common misconception of mathematics as a black-and-white discipline and of being good at math as entailing ease, speed, and correctness. You will find it full of color, possibility, puzzles, and delight…let yourself be drawn in.
— Elham Kazemi from the foreword
While mathematicians describe mathematics as playful, beautiful, creative, and captivating, many students describe math class as boring, stressful, useless, and humiliating. In Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had, Tracy Zager helps teachers close this gap by making math class more like mathematics.
Tracy spent years observing a diverse set of classrooms in which all students had access to meaningful mathematics. She partnered with teachers who helped students internalize the habits of mind of mathematicians as they grappled with age-appropriate content. From these scores of observations, Tracy selected and analyzed the most revealing, fruitful, thought-provoking examples of teaching and learning to share with you in this book.
Through these vivid stories, you’ll gain insight into effective instructional decision making. You’ll engage with big concepts and pick up plenty of practical details about how to implement new teaching strategies.
All teachers can move toward increasingly authentic, delightful, robust mathematics teaching and learning for themselves and their students. This important book helps us develop instructional techniques that will make the math classes we teach so much better than the math classes we took.