How did I get here?
In my history of school funding seminar last week, students asked me something personal. We were talking about how hard and wonky school finance is, and they asked me why/how I started researching it.
Specifically, they asked if I’m a ‘math person’.
I chuckled and told them no, basically the opposite. I grew up terrified of math. I think I was so scared because math was the thing that smart people were good at. Which means that, if you’re not good at it, you’re not smart. And if you’re not smart, well, you’re just worse.
These things were all wrapped up with my family’s middle class focus on getting good grades, doing well in school and getting a good job that makes a lot of money and being successful, etc. The whole schooling in capitalist America ideological shebang. Being good at math meant a higher likelihood at my fulfilling this fantasy. Maybe I sensed that and got afraid I wouldn’t fulfill the fantasies, which configured a nice little math complex in my subjectivity.
In any case, whenever I was in math class I seized up. When I was faced with a puzzle or math problem, all I wanted to do was escape. I got average/not great grades. I became ‘not a math person’.
Philosophy of math
But then I got to college and took a logic class. By a fluke of my university’s general education requirements, logic counted as a language and I didn’t want to take any foreign language classes. I really liked logic. I had a great professor, the logician and philosopher of mathematics Michelé Friend. So after the intro course I took the next level up, symbolic logic.
Turns out I was pretty good at logical proofs. I could do them quickly and I really liked translating natural language into formal language and then exploring the philosophical questions it all entailed (one time I spent an hour translating ‘god bless you’, such a nerd). I was getting more and more into philosophy too. Dr. Friend took notice.
After I turned in my final symbolic logic exams, she invited me to a seminar she offered where she invited undergrads interested in advanced logic to read contemporary works in the field with her. I thought it sounded great, feeling recognized for being good at something mathy. I enrolled.
I started when I was a sophomore and loved it. I took the class five more times each semester until I graduated. Those classes were some of the best experiences I had in undergraduate coursework. We read a set theory textbook, talked about the mathematics of infinity, etc.
One of my proudest moments was when I derived the law of bivalence from the disjunction rule in first order logic in under fifteen lines of proof. Cool right?
Part of the appeal for me was revenge: I was good at math dammit. And not only was I good at it, I could talk about the philosophical underpinnings of math that even ‘math people’ didn’t know about. Part of it too was how nice and supportive and rigorous Dr. Friend was, and the feeling that I was part of something very specialized that only a few people could do.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the semantics of the empty set. Basically, I talked about how mathematics is logically premised on the concept of nothingness (literally means nothing) and how strange our theories of meaning need to be just to make sense of numbers at all. A professor in my department advising theses said “there’s really only a couple people who can make heads or tails of what you’re talking about here.”
I was proud and thought, you’re goddamn right!
A left turn
But my trajectory was not typical from there. I didn’t go into law, computer science, or business (which is what can happen to people who are good at logic). I became a teacher and wanted to write novels and travel the world.
I was more interested in education and adventure. After teaching high school in Washington, DC I got a job teaching at an international school in Ecuador and lived there for two years. I got radicalized reading about Latin American history. I read Paulo Freire as part of a master’s program.
I took a left turn in my thinking: I read Marx with friends in Quito. I read Polanyi. I read about indigenous history and the struggle against oil exploitation (even published on this at n+1 after meeting Ben Kunkel on a trip in Buenos Aires).
So I started doing critical pedagogy/leftist theory of education. But my interest in numbers was still there. A I read Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1 with a friend and watched David Harvey’s helpful videos. Reading Marx is mathy, and when I did my master’s thesis on discussion pedagogies, I measured turn-taking in my classroom. I even came up with a mathematical formula to try and combat dominance and individualism during classroom discussions that a teacher would call ‘wonky communism’.
When I got into graduate school for Philosophy and Education at Columbia, I was deep into leftist stuff. Then Occupy Wall Street happened. I was there from the beginning. I started organizing with people interested in pedagogy and education, and my dissertation ended up being about the ideology of classroom discussion.
To school funding
My interest in numbers didn’t go away, but it was dormant. I published a bunch on pedagogy and got interested in Althusser for awhile. Even in a short book introducing his thinking to educators I used logical formulae to express thoughts.
Althusser’s all about social structure and his theory of education is that it’s an ideological state apparatus that reproduces capitalist relations of production. He’s not a great person to write about given his scary history (he was severely mentally ill and killed his wife during a psychotic break), but his theory was and is pretty important.
So I didn’t didn’t want to be ‘the Althusser guy’ in education for a bunch of reasons. I wanted to apply Althusser’s theory. I also wanted to contribute something useful to the movements for education justice as a socialist. Althusser’s theory is really helpful for understanding how specific institutions contribute to the larger class struggle, and it seemed to me the most obvious way to apply the theory–and help the movements where I was organizing– was to think about school funding: how does money come and go in education? What would a socialist say about this stuff?
Like my experience with math and logic (and discussion and Althusser sort of), I’m continually drawn to things that are powerful and hard to understand. My tendency to think-as-revenge against powerful complexity drew me to school funding too. It’s very powerful and hard to understand. I’m not afraid of numbers or formulae anymore, I care about education, and I’m mad at capitalism for sucking so much. School finance was a perfect next step and combined these different threads of my intelletual journey.