I am going to type a super quick post, because I need a break from thinking about school and classes, and I decided that this will be it. I realize that some of you might be celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month in your schools, and wonder how you can bring that into your math classrooms. I’m sure there are lots of ways. But I wanted to share — or remind some of you, if you forgot — of this amazing website called Lathisms.org.

It has profiles and posters of Latinx and Hispanic Mathematicians! And so many interview podcasts, where kids can hear what mathematicians do, but also hear stories that either might resonate with them because they’ve experienced similar things as the interviewee, or inform them of something they might not have experienced or even knew was an experience.

At our school, another teacher and I created a “Math Space” outside of our math office. (Read more about that here.) Since we’re now in COVID-times, we don’t have the table and stools there for students. But we still have the bulletin board. So I printed out two of the posters from the Lathisms site, and created my own poster of a passage from Evelyn Lamb about why we should care about these stories.

It’s a little barren, but this is what it looks like:

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do in my classes yet… But I am thinking of having them leave class 7 minutes early to come to the hallway, and have different students read different paragraphs aloud for the poster I made and also for one of the mathematicians. (And of course share the Lathisms site with them, and encourage them to listen to a podcast or read more.)

Wait, maybe the reading aloud in the hallway thing isn’t a good idea because with the masks it’s just hard to hear things… I might need to re-think! But now, I have to go back to planning for classes and looking at nightly work. Adios!