The "What am I doing here?" Manifesto.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am a math teacher. I have the patience of a 90 year-old grandmother. I have the wit of a stand-up comedian. On occasion, the humor of a 13 year-old boy. And I have been blogging for years without any direction.

I am Crystal Math of the Complex Radicals, though don't ask me who they are (some of 'em are imaginary!). I started teaching in 2008 -- a year of growth for me, filled with political protests and unknowingly meeting my future husband at a farmer's market. Within that year, I learned the hard way of how to plan a lesson, discipline students, and balance home life with a career. I also decided to pursue a teaching credential -- I felt valued at the little charter high school where students wrote their feelings on their homework and we held monthly community meetings with families. About a decade later, Crystal Math is no less radical but a little more complex.

But none of that has to do with what I am DOING. HERE. TODAY.

I want to do more with my career than go back and forth from home and work, work and home. I want to give students more than formulas and numbers that some of them might never use. I want to help be a part of the bigger picture in showing students how to find meaning through mathematics. But I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to do that, because no one in my family ever pivoted their career to the "bigger picture" perspective. Maybe I am just getting overzealous.

Within the past year, I have seen our society change the way they think about teachers. I want to push back and be sassy, but I find more meaning in leaning in to find positivity, and cultivate change.

Purple flowers

Today I am grateful for the relationships we build with our community. Our neighbors, teachers, friends, and colleagues. Without them, I would feel like a lost puzzle piece. With them, I feel like a cog in a well-oiled machine, I feel warmth and security and camaraderie. With them, I also celebrate their gains and sympathize their losses.

This morning, I learned that one the daycare workers where my baby attends had lost her own daughter to cancer. At only 26, she was taken from her mother Maria, her neighbors, her teachers, her friends and colleagues. I had wondered why Maria had been out all week. I didn't know the young woman that died, but I know that her mother greets me everyday when I drop off my own baby at daycare. Her mother will talk to me in Spanish so I can practice, and she doesn't know it, but when I take my baby home and I speak Spanish to her, she is calm and cool and understands.

I often speak to my students about the effects they have on one another as ripples in a pond. The interactions others see and hear from you will, in turn, affect how they act and react to others. Maria has been nothing but gracious in the way she looks after my baby and the others; it has given me a peace of mind while I go to work so I can further support my family. I just hope that she can get the time she needs to mourn and heal.

A mother and daughter are separate, beautiful flowers that share the same roots.