In honor of Pi Day on March 14, this week’s episode features two stories about how a particular number has impacted the lives of the storytellers.
Part 1: Math teacher Theodore Chao goes all out for Pi Day at his school.
Theodore Chao is an associate professor of mathematics education at The Ohio State University. He who loves using video and storytelling to get kids to share about how they really do math, not what someone told them they need to do. He is a former filmmaker, startup founder, and middle school teacher who now spends his time supporting teachers, writing articles, and using research funds to show that kids hold tremendous math power.
Part 2: Debbie Char learns what a flash point is while cooking a meal for her date.
Debbie Char is grateful that along with silver hair, aging has offered opportunities to do what she loves. She gets to teach math at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park, sing with an LGBTQ chorus called CHARIS, share her love of books with preschoolers as a Ready Reader, cook suet for birds and meals for people in homeless shelters, bike in Forest Park, tend a tiny garden, explore the city with her husband and rescue mutt, play with her two grandbabies, and go to bed early.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
March 14th, Brooklyn, 2004. March 14th might not mean a lot to you, but to us middle school math teachers March 14th is everything. Some of us know this as Pi Day. Finally, a chance to throw a party and celebrate the nerdy math geek culture that I wanted my kids to have a taste of, Pi Day.
And I go all out for Pi Day. 300 fresh pies from bakeries all over Brooklyn donated and delivered to my school. Cafeteria staff unlock, ready to slice up all those pies so that each and every single kid got a fresh slice of pie on Pi Day so that they always remember March 14th. 3-1-4 is a mathematical constant pi.
We have a day full of games, costumes, songs and a digits of pi memorization contest. And I also made sure that every staff member and every parent who helped us out gets to bring home a fresh pie, because that's how we do. Like Biggie reminded us, “Spread love, it's the Brooklyn way.”
I love events like Pi Day because it allowed me to see different versions of my students that I might not see in class. For instance, Jakayla, who, in her signature black trucker hat and constant application of lipgloss might be seen as a detached kid, but she was one of those sneaky math lovers. She was the kid I looked to when my lessons were going south. Sitting in the back, she had this way of getting the rest of the class back on track just by asking a question or showing her interest in math. If she didn't get it then I knew the lesson was going over the kids’ heads.
Sometimes you meet someone whose presence just lights up the room. I mean on the days Jakayla was absent, I noticed how different the tone of the whole class changed because her light, her energy wasn't there. She was always willing to go to the board whether she knew how to solve a problem or not and just because she was willing to try and not be scared to make a mistake in front of the rest of the class. She showed all of us that math isn't about brilliance, it's about trying.
And I knew she had her heart set on Brooklyn Tech High School to be the first kid in her family to go to college. And I realized my role was to help get her there.
But on Pi Day, I saw an even more engaged version of Jakayla. She had put together a Pi Day step crew and, for real, they performed a whole Pi Day step routine. Clapping and stomping in unison, shouting out things like, “Circumference over diameter, ratio. [claps hands]” I still remember just falling in love with the geekiness of it all.
Now, the one part that I hated the most about being a middle school math teacher, grading. Oh, how I hated grading. Grading is this horrible exercise in which you get reminded by just how bad of a teacher you are, just a constant eroding of your confidence that you have any impact whatsoever as a teacher. So, of course, I always procrastinated my grading until the very last minute.
Grading things on Sunday afternoon, usually with the TV on, beer and pizza. Lots of delicious greasy Brooklyn pizza. And I'd spend my Sunday afternoons in this pizza-and-beer pit of grading shame.
One of the reasons grading for my middle school students was so stressful was because in New York at the time, there existed this controversial tiered system of high schools. As an eighth grader, you have to apply to get into one of the eight top-tier specialized high schools. You have to take a pretty competitive test in order to get into any of these schools. And some of them look at your grades and your portfolio too.
So for my eighth graders, like Jakayla, getting into one of these high schools is a pretty surefire way to get into college, so their math grades really matter. And all this is happening while I'm trying to cover a relentless curriculum. The grades, the high school applications, the curriculum, all of it revolves around this big lie that we all choose to believe. We pretend that math and intelligence are the same thing. Like if you do well in math you're smart and if you don't do well in math you're dumb.
I know I hate to admit this, but even as a math teacher I sometimes internalize this, carrying around trauma because of something that happened in middle school for myself that made me feel like I wasn't a true mathematician.
So on Monday, hungover because of another Sunday flurry of drunk, greasy grading, I started the class by walking around the classroom placing these tests down on each kid's desk as they were settling in. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it because we've got to get to our lesson because we have to hit the scope and sequence calendar so we can cover everything for this quiz on Friday so we can hit the unit test in two weeks. Just keep up, just keep up, just keep up.
And I hear a wail.
I look up. Jakayla is in full ugly cry, bawling at the back of the room, huge sobs, gulps, tears. And I don't know what to do. I'm so hungover. I just keep passing out tests just I got to get them to every kid.
Other kids come over and console Jakayla, and then I remember. When I was writing those grades down in my grade book last night, oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Jakayla got a 65. Oh, she failed the test. That's why she's bawling.
I was paralyzed. Last week, we just had a mandatory professional development about how none of us, especially the male teachers, should ever have a student with us in a room with the door closed and how we should never ever, ever, ever reach out to touch or initiate physical contact with any student, particularly our female students. I don't know what to do.
I wish I could have consoled her. I wanted to sit down and say, “Hey, all these tests, all these applications, all this homework, it's all part of a lie. None of it reflects the fact that I see you. I see your brilliance, Jakayla.” And I wanted to give her a hug and let her know it's going to be okay.
But I didn't. I froze. I think I grabbed a box of tissues and put it on her desk and say, “Let's talk about this later.”
I turned around, hung over, turned off the lights, turned on that stupid loud projector so I could start today's lesson and I just went on teaching.
I tried so hard to make math learning fun and yet I destroyed one of my favorite students. I realized I was a fool for believing that I was the cool teacher that kids love. All the fun activities, that whole celebration of Pi Day, making sure every kid gets a slice of pie, it was just a mask covering up that I was actually part of the problem.
Here was Jakayla, a bright young woman from Brooklyn who learned that you can do well in school and you can make something. And she made everyone around her better. But because of some arithmetic errors, I think she misremembered which way the inequality sign is supposed to go when you divide by a negative coefficient. Small stuff like that. Because of that, she failed my unit test, which knocked her out of contention of getting into her dream high school.
And now, the system told her that she didn't belong in the club of who gets to do math. I had reinforced the stereotype that women of color cannot engage in mathematics. I had become a teacher because I vowed to challenge these stereotypes, because I vowed to break through this gatekeeping. But instead, I did the same crap. I reinforced the same trauma.
Jakayla was never the same after that. She stopped engaging. She stopped raising her hand. She stopped being the kid I looked to when my lessons were falling apart. She never went to the board again. Not only did Jakayla fail my test, I failed Jakayla.
I left teaching middle school at the end of that year. I was so torn. I knew something was wrong. Why were such amazing kids getting pushed out of the system?
I learned that trying to be a cool math teacher and making math fun, it was just a band‑aid solution and not the cure to a real problem. It's not about making math fun. It's about recognizing the brilliance that so many kids have in dismantling oppressive systems.
And March 14th, it's still a trip for me. Every year my students all over Facebook, all over Instagram they find me and they always flood my feed with pictures of pie, lots and lots of pie. I get Happy Pi Day messages all day long, but I've never gotten a message from Jakayla. She's never wished me a happy Pi Day. And every Pi Day I still think about her.
Part 2
There was this guy. This guy who had been my best friend since freshman year, he and I would go, we hung out together and we studied together. It was great.
But I was starting to think maybe there was just a little bit of something more than friendship to our relationship, so I decided to test it out. I invited him to dinner to a home-cooked, or should I say mod-cooked meal.
Now, the guy, when he was back home, he's from an Asian family and so he was really missing Chinese food. So I decided I was going to whip up an authentic Chinese meal for him.
So I got on the T, which is the Boston's version of public transportation, went to the Asian food store, and picked out a box of shrimp chips. Now the instructions on the shrimp chips, they were in Chinese, which I don't speak or read, so I kind of bypassed those. But right at the bottom was a translation into English. And that translation was just three words, “Boil in oil.” Perfect. I could do that.
So I got back on the T, went back to my mod (campus modular apartment), and I got to tell you, I had cooked pasta so many times in my life I was pretty good at it. To cook pasta you take a big pot. You fill it with water. You put the pot on the stove. You turn the stove on high and you wait. And after a few minutes little bubbles come up and that's called boiling and then you put the pasta in the water.
Well, okay. Boil in oil, that's what I was going to do with the shrimp chips.
So I took this big bottle of cooking oil, vegetable oil, poured the whole bottle into the pot, put the pot on the stove, turned the stove on high and waited for the bubbles so I could pour in the shrimp chips.
I waited and I waited. And after a few minutes, instead of bubbles, what I started getting was smoke coming up from the oil. The smoke got thicker and blacker and it started to kind of fill and billow through the mod kitchen. So I of course did what any well-rounded, educated individual would do. I went to the window and I opened the window and I waited some more for the bubbles. They never came.
Here's a little bit of science for those Math and French majors listening tonight. Here's a little science that I have learned since that time. When you superheat vegetable oil to 450 degrees Fahrenheit, what happens is it reaches what they call a flash point. A flash point means that it bursts into flames. Who knew? That's what happened to my oil. It burst into flames.
Now, as a math major, I had studied something called the exponential function. Exponential growth is things that double and double and double and get out of control very quickly. The example that had always been given to me was fire.
Debbie Char shares her story to a limited audience at Public Media Commons in St. Louis, MI in February 2022. Photo by Joe Martinez.
Well, I had never seen the exponential function in action until that night. I watched in horror as the flames started to come up and they caught on to the cabinets up above me. And then those cabinets caught onto other cabinets and the fire was going around me. And then it caught onto the curtains in front of the windows.
The next few minutes were a blur. I remember screaming for my roommates. One of them was home. She happened to be a nursing major so she had the wherewithal to actually turn off the stove and the two of us ran out of the mod, bypassing the fire extinguisher that was mounted to the wall. Who knew that was there?
So we got outside safely. And I remember hearing sirens and hearing alarms. The guys from across the way in their mod, apparently they knew where their fire extinguisher was, because they grabbed their fire extinguishers. They jumped over the chain-link fence and they were putting out the fire. And then the fire department came and they were spraying things.
Finally, the fire was out. And just as the fire department was leaving, up walked the guy. The guy whose attention I was trying to spark with this beautiful meal that I was going to make. He was half an hour late.
Now, this guy being a science major, he was incredulous. “What do you mean? You thought oil would boil? What do you mean you didn't know about a flash point?”
But not only was he incredulous, he was very gracious. He came into the mod and we turned on the radio and we were talking as we scrubbed the entire thing down. We had to throw away the curtains. We had to throw away the melted pots and pans. We had to scrub the floor and the tiles and the cabinets, get all the soot off of the cabinets. Neither one of us got dinner that night.
A few days later, I was called before a tribunal of administrators from Boston College to determine whether I would get kicked out of school and not be able to graduate for my little act of arson. So I went to this tribunal. I was terrified. And I explained my story to them. They talked it over. And their verdict, that I was ignorant, but not negligent, so I got to stay at school and I got to graduate.
A lot of things have happened since then. Let me catch you up. First of all, my career. I became not a scientist. No. Not even a nurse and definitely not a chef. But I did become a teacher, like my dad.
Debbie Char shares her story to a limited audience at Public Media Commons in St. Louis, MI in February 2022. Photo by Joe Martinez.
And instead of science like he teaches or taught, I teach math. And every semester, I teach my students about this fire that I started, partly to save their lives. I don't know how many lives I've saved over the years of people who didn't know about this flash point thing, but also because I blame the translation from Chinese into English, “Boil in oil,” what do they think I was trying to do? Exactly that, right? That was a terrible translation.
And in math, what we often try to do is translate from the language of English into the symbols of mathematics. We call those equations. We solve the equations and that answers the original question. Well, if you do a poor translation, you get a lousy solution that doesn't make any sense. That's where we get those fractional buses and those negative numbers of people that people are always getting when they try and do math problems. So that's what I don't want.
The mods. I looked on the Boston College website the other day. Those temporary mods 40 years later are still on campus and still housing students. Yeah.
And the guy, that guy who came late but who stayed and helped me clean up, well, we're still best friends. He's still cleaning up after me. We've been married for 37 years. And when it came time to get married, I decided that, after all we had been through, maybe it was fitting that I take his last name, Char.
Thank you.