Good intentions, bolted onto an unchanged foundation, still depend on individual courage to survive.
I've watched many education systems reach, sincerely, for the right pieces — belonging, student agency, equity work. I believe the people doing that work mean it. But when a new piece is added onto a structure that was never taken apart and redesigned to hold it, the piece has nothing underneath it. It survives only as long as the particular humans holding it have the courage and the capacity to keep holding it. That's not a structure. That's a hope balanced on a person, and hope-dependent systems tend to break, because people get tired, reassigned and replaced.
So the work that actually needs to be done isn't inside the building — it's underneath it. I'd been working on the wrong solution because I hadn't asked the right question. The question was never “How do we fix the system?” It was “How could we design a structure with equity and belonging built into its foundation, instead of asking people to hold up the flags and decorations forever after?” Like any reasonable mathematician, I knew I needed to scale the problem down to something local-sized — there are far too many sharks swimming in that ocean, and far too many variables and relationships to model a complete functional structure at full scale. So I built a math habitat instead: a tide pool.
A tide pool doesn't reform the ocean. It doesn't need to. It is part of the ocean, formed by it, and will return to it — but for the hours the tide is out, it holds its own weather. That's the scale JoyMath works at now.
