Join us for the Yale Science and Engineering Association livestream conversation on math education featuring Ben Orlin ’09, author of the “Math with Bad Drawings” books.
Teaching middle and high school math, Orlin became fascinated with how students experience success and failure. It seemed a single test could reshape a student's whole self-image. In writing for The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and Popular Science, Orlin explored these and related questions: Why does society regard math with a peculiar mix of reverence and contempt? How do the artificial structures of the classroom distort our vision of math? How can math-estranged adults reconnect with the subject?
Orlin learned that these heavy conversations went better if he led with his genuinely incompetent stick-figure art. Hence his three books: “Math with Bad Drawings” (2018), “Change is the Only Constant” (2019), and “Math Games with Bad Drawings” (2022), playful works of math popularization that attempt to envision (and to nudge us toward) a world of universal mathematical literacy.
Leading the conversation is Elissa Dunn Levy ’09, the YSEA president and a teacher of physics and computer science.
