“Your head’s inflated and equations popping out your ears,” said Julius, handing me his painstakingly hand-drawn portrait. Not just me — he had one for all 28 of us in the class. We joked he was “the poor man’s Picasso.”
But come second period, and Julius just shut off. He moved to the back of the class and kept to himself. The spark that had lit up his eyes was blunted. It was algebra. I’d race through a problem and rush to Julius in a bid to convince him it was worth solving. But no, he was drawing “A Starry Night.” I plead, “An Euler is as beautiful as a Van Gogh; a Gauss no more alluring than a Monet.” But Julius just shakes his head.
This story hits home in the Bronx. As a Bronxite all my life, I’ve encountered countless friends like Julius, who just don’t see the Pythagorean Theorem the way they do a Picasso or hear Pascal’s Triangle the way they do Mozart’s “Fifth Symphony.”
Remote learning has made it worse, pushing children like Julius to the edge of the classroom. He went from a fully three-dimensional, at least minimally-engaged child in the classroom to a two-dimensional pixelated image (if cameras are on) to a one-dimensional nametag on a black background, with videos and mics off, all but excluded from the classroom conversation.
What can I do? I have nowhere near the influence or leadership required to make structural changes in how math is perceived in the Bronx. Should I volunteer? I love volunteering in South Bronx United as a math and SAT prep tutor, but most of the children who come already care about math. Should I canvass? That would be brutally inefficient, and I’d come to know all too well how difficult it is to engage the community by knocking on doors. Should I email local politicians to promote math? I had no faith in the frustratingly inertial bureaucracy.
So I hit the streets with some chalk and passion. And Math4Bronx was born. Every weekend, for a few hours, I’d solve math problems on the quarter-mile of green construction boards outlining Lehman College.
At first, it wasn’t as well-received as I’d hoped. Construction workers threatened fines. Local gangs scrawled profanity over the equations. And residents thought it was worse than graffiti.
Granted, Math4Bronx is perhaps no more than a mode of inspiration, but that in itself is the ammunition for change. Slowly, people began to change their minds.
Construction workers began stopping me on the street, asking me to explain the solution again; runners stopped mid-jog for a break to look at the equations and would ask me if they could try to solve it themselves; parents would slowly walk their children through the walls of math as if walking through a museum.
For the first time in their lives, people had the answer to, “Why do we need to learn this?” Math was actually in their real-world, populating the streets they walk on, the roads they drive on, and the bricks they build on.
For the first time in my life, I saw people love math the way an artist loves a Rembrandt or a musician loves the “Fifth Symphony.” I saw them become believers in the power of algebra and geometry — embracing equations instead of banishing them.
Math4Bronx is a change in the making. Come outside, and bring your chalk. The revolution has begun.
Refath Bari is a student at Brooklyn Tech and the author of 55 Days in Dharavi.
