Challenges come to us from many different angles. Part of my job is to create challenges in the form of interesting mathematical tasks. The trick is to make the task interesting and deep enough to warrant the time being spent to complete it. I find this troublesome yet exciting and fulfilling to complete.

I am trying to challenge myself physically. Early morning dates with my elliptical machine are difficult for me to get excited about—especially at 4:30 a..m. Once I’m up, dressed and have the lights on, I’m glad I decided to meet my ‘date’, but it’s the ‘getting up’ that’s the most challenging part.

It seems to me that the challenge of math class is just like that of my machine: participants need to do it, yet don’t look forward to it as an exciting part of their day. So, my dilemma is this: how do I make math a class that all kids look forward to? How do I coach my teachers to have that same feeling—and not feel like they’re offering cod liver oil to their students? Excitement—passionate teachers—that’s what we need!

I had a recent opportunity to be surrounded with others who share my passion and commitment for teaching. What an exciting, hopeful day! If only we could clone ourselves to pepper every school with folks like us who know that all students CAN learn difficult math—and end up liking doing math at the same time! Unfortunately that is not possible, so we need to figure out what we can do to encourage every single teacher to be the very BEST they can be as they teach every child math every day. This makes getting up early to meet my elliptical sound like a walk in the park. Talk about a challenge!