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I was born and raised in Nepal, the county with the highest peak in the world, Mt. Everest, and the birthplace of lord Gautam Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. I have been working as a Math as well as Physics teacher in my home country Nepal for about 28 years. I arrived in California on…

How Can We Increase Participation? We know that active participation can improve learning. When a student talks about their answers to questions or creates a new math question of their own, they learn more. However, getting high levels of participation is difficult. Some students feel that they do not wish to speak out for fear…

It was February 2020. I was a few months away from graduating in a global pandemic (with a Bachelor’s in Economics), and I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. It wasn’t as though the world was begging for economists during that time. I remember browsing through job listings, anxious about my future…

In his recent article published in The Atlantic, Kids Are Far, Far Behind In School, Thomas Kane cites the data point that students in high-poverty schools that stayed remote during the 2020-2021 school year lost the equivalent of 22 weeks of schooling. As someone that’s seen students struggle to re-integrate socially and academically into the…

Blueprint: Hi Blueprint! Today we have a special guest, Blueprint legend Mr. Justin Diza. I wish I had an airhorn for that. We’re here to discuss life after Blueprint and how your years with Blueprint led you to where you are, as our current fellows are navigating life after Blueprint. Justin, can you please share…

If you don’t need teaching as part of your life, if you don’t really love it, don’t be a teacher. But how do you know without trying it? How do you try it? How do you figure out what to do while you’re trying it out? I was asked to write a blog post about…

It’s spring, which means that school districts and education non-profits like Blueprint are already interviewing for the upcoming school year. Blueprint has interviewed over 1000 candidates over the past decade and we’d like to share some best practices and tips that bring the right people into the classroom! Tips for Math Fellow Applicants Do your…

If you want to start a lively debate on education – bring up standardized testing! But even as a teacher who felt that these high-stakes tests exacerbated inequities and provided little actionable instructional data, I still wanted my students to do well on the tests. In fact, I felt it would be a disservice to…

The other day I was in a 6th grade math classroom. The scene was what you might expect: students working independently or with partners, worksheets featuring a string of problems on fraction division, the teacher pausing to address occasional outbursts. But then something magical occurred: the teacher invited students to do the problems on the…

Blueprint Math Fellows facilitate Number Talks to improve students’ mental math and computational strategies. In this narrative piece, one of our Lead Fellows gives us a behind-the-scenes look at what it means to orchestrate a number talk. I write the problem on the board. It almost doesn’t matter what it is. A discussion can grow…