This post is by Ralph Pantozzi, a 2024–2025 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress.
As the school year ends, learning math can continue in places you might not realize. As Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress this year, I’ve worked to help others recognize the “everyday math” in our lives at work, at home, or at play. In this post, I’ll share some finds related to math in the real world, and introduce you to Dr. Gloria Ford Gilmer, whose papers in the Manuscript Division speak to her work as a pioneer in this area.
Shopping for Math
Let’s start with the above cartoon, which appeared in the Washington Evening star on January 05, 1947. Examine it with your family. Don’t prompt them to look specifically for mathematics.
- First, what do you and your family notice? Make a list of features that stand out.
- Then, talk about conclusions you think you can draw. Are the kids near the checkout lane about to crash their carts? Do you think the store is somewhat busy? Why or why not?
- Next, turn to questions. You might wonder about the different people in the image and what they are thinking as they shop.
- Lastly, use this cartoon as inspiration for continued conversation. You might discuss your own shopping trips to different stores.
Did any mathematical concepts such as estimation, shape, or location arise naturally in your conversation? If you talked about navigating aisles, weighing items, comparing prices, counting money, or estimating time, you’re found math! In the article that accompanied this cartoon, the managers did too: they observed that people in the store never shopped for just one item, and that items tucked in corners didn’t sell well. All such observations and thinking count as math.
Next, consider this image from 1943. Before reading any further, download a high resolution image of the photograph at this link. Share the image with your family and look for both numbers and other details.
Discuss what you notice and what you wonder. What conclusions do you think you can draw? In the poster, “How to Shop with War Ration Book Two”, you will find lots of possible inspirations for thinking and reasoning that involve mathematics of a very practical nature.
Shopping, past or present, is but one everyday activity that involves concepts like quantity, shape, time, location, and logical reasoning. Games, jobs, hobbies, and cultural traditions often involve thinking that might not immediately stand out as math. For example, consider designing fishing nets, hair braiding, preparing meals and making candy: all involve math. Where might you find math today? Cast your net wide!
Dr. Gloria Ford Gilmer: An Eye for Math
Gloria Ford Gilmer (1928 – 2021) found math everywhere. Gilmer, a professor, researcher, and teacher trainer, was the first African American woman member of the Board of Governors of the Mathematical Association of America. Dr. Gilmer was the first Black female mathematician to have her papers archived in the Library’s Manuscript Division. These papers, donated to the Library of Congress by her family in 2022, contain a wealth of wisdom for families.
Gloria Ford was born in 1928 to James Ford, an immigrant from Barbados, and Mittie Hall, a teacher from Georgia. She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. In her youth, she worked at her father’s grocery store. In the text of a speech she delivered in 1994, Gilmer recalled using math “while working in my fathers’ store. There I was, always counting, weighing, locating items in space, and reasoning with customers.”
In the same speech, Gilmer described herself as a reluctant math student: “I didn’t like arithmetic in school and didn’t understand it well.” However, learning from supportive teachers who recognized the importance of listening to students, Gilmer excelled in high school and college, and earned top grades in her graduate school mathematics program.
Gilmer’s life experiences in the 1950s and 1960s inspired a lifelong curiosity about how people learn, and an interest in expanding educational opportunity for all. She became a K-12 teacher, then a college instructor, and put aside pure mathematics to pursue a degree in education.
With a doctorate in Education Administration, Gilmer worked with schools, parent groups, and professional organizations for three decades, promoting math as a tool for civil rights. She formed her own educational consulting business to produce workshops and materials. She concluded that effective education must start with a deep respect for other people and their knowledge – regardless of their age. As expressed in her notes from a 1990s presentation, below: “Make no assumptions about what people can learn”.
In the communities where she lived, Dr Gilmer spoke with Black students and families whose knowledge and skills often went unrecognized. By helping others find the mathematics in their world, she demonstrated that those students had talents that became evident when stereotypes were put aside, and education was grounded in daily experience.
Dr. Gilmer drew on these conversations to explain how parents and teachers could find learning opportunities almost anywhere. Consider this diagram that Dr. Gilmer created for a presentation.
In the image, the phrase “the human body and how it works” is at the center, with connections radiating out to other topics of research. What other arrows might you and your family draw from that origin? What other topics might you add to the diagram, based on your own life experiences? What other diagrams, with different centers, might you create?
In a well-received talk in 1999, Dr. Gilmer connected hairstyling practices in local hair salons to the mathematics of fractal geometry (the repeating patterns you might find in a fern or a nautilus shell).
Dr. Gilmer understood that a trip to the grocery store or the hair salon was an opportunity to start with the fundamentals of sorting, counting, designing, locating, and reasoning and build towards abstract mathematics. In a 2001 publication, Dr. Gilmer wrote that mathematics could “develop from the learner’s surroundings and move seamlessly into the school as the process of inducting young people into the mathematical aspects of their culture.” For Gilmer, culture could mean the physical environment and anything humans did in these places, such as tossing a ball and eating an ice cream cone. She hosted family math nights and teacher workshops, where she shared how math could be found in “nature”, which she defined as any place that kids and families were—playgrounds, the beach, the subway, and more.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve considered Dr. Gilmer’s approach, look back the image at the start of the post. You might have noticed the two kids about to topple a large display of “”Whiffo” soup cans. This may be something to avoid in real life, but simply stacking cups or cans at home can lead to a variety of mathematical questions. How many paper or plastic cups would it take to reach a ceiling in your home? How does it depend on how you stack them? How many cans does it take to create a triangular stack of cans of different heights, like those in the photograph from 1943? How many do you need to make pyramids of different shapes and heights?
I invite you to also look, as I have, at some previous posts in Minerva’s Kaleidoscope like this one about cultural festivals, with an eye to math. I found this and the other posts listed below contain a variety of opportunities to consider quantity, shape, time, location, logical reasoning, and other forms of math. Let us know what you find!
Further Resources to Find Math In: