 Hi my name is Melvin. I had the pleasure to teach sixth grade math this year and what I noticed in my classes how my students saw themselves as mathematicians greatly expanded or limited their opportunities for doing math and so hence today's presentation. When I was 10, I tried to read my sister's calculus textbook. I didn't know algebra so it didn't really work but it was worth my time and it spoke to a larger issue and that issue was I had a positive mathematical identity. I felt like I could do math. I saw math as a web of interconnected ideas and those ideas were meaningful to me. Now those feelings didn't just fall out of the sky. A lot of very specific things had to happen. I was affirmed by my teachers. I was positioned by my peers as an expert. I had a personal inclination to do math and science and frankly I benefited from various forms of bias. I was short, skinny, I had glasses. My name is Melvin. I didn't have a lot of friends and frankly, you know, there was the model minority stereotype that Asians are good at math. So I fit into the stereotype of what it meant to be good at math and so I felt that way. So that was my identity. I had the opportunity to ask my sixth graders what their mathematical identities were, what their histories were math were and why they felt the way they did. So I'm going to share three snippets from three different students. So the first snippet is quote, I remember the summer before second grade my grandfather would give my sister and I about 10 problems every day to solve. I never really understood what I was doing. I recall crying because he had to explain the same thing over and over but I still couldn't understand. The second, I started to gain momentum and by the time I made it to 100 by the end of five minutes my mom said, hugged me and said, oh my gosh, you are correct and that's when I knew math was my thing. And my third student said, sometimes I wonder how people know how to solve questions so quickly while I'm struggling with them. It makes, it sometimes makes me feel annoyed and jealous that I'm so slow. So why am I sharing this with you? I'm sharing this with you because everybody in this room takes part or will take part in the formation of someone else's mathematical identity. But if you came to Yuri Trisman's talk last week you might remember a bitter truth he shared that math, this thing that we love is a burial ground for so many students' aspirations and in my words it makes them feel less than. So here's the most important thing I have to say today. How your students see themselves in relation to math cannot be left to chance because if it is then math continues to be a gatekeeper with winners and with losers. And sure we can say math is for everybody, you know, everybody's a math person and that's a fine start but we've known this as a community for years and yet the dominant narrative continues to be that people say I'm just not a math person. So what do we do about it? First we have to acknowledge that how students come to their mathematical identities is complicated and is deeply tied in with issues such as gender and with race. And because of this complexity I believe we have an obligation to read about and think critically about the relationship between mathematics and self but I am going to share just three quick thoughts that I have run across that I think help us move beyond simply saying everybody is a math person. So the first, just because a student has a high grade doesn't mean that they have a healthy relationship to math. Sometimes our most successful students have the narrowest view of mathematics to the extent that they inadvertently treat math as a culture of exclusion and even exclude themselves. The second, identity is not something that our students possess. It's something that they do with the opportunities we give them. So if all we do is talk at our students then of course they're going to see math as a system of rules and at best theorems followed by proofs. Now before my third point I'm going to share this quote by Francis Sue and his quote implies that math helps build our identity but I think it can go the other way too. This quote from Rashalgi Tiara says that mathematics needs people just as much as people need math and so with that I'll leave with the final thought I had. Let's not begin with the assumption that math can save our students but instead let's start with the knowledge that our students will be the ones to save math. Thanks.