How one math teacher’s training went so wrong
Learning how to teach math was the last priority in teacher education, says one teacher
Today’s letter is an important one: In a new Q&A, a high school math teacher talks in-depth to The Bell Ringer about his experience in a master’s for teaching program, with an emphasis on secondary math. He was so appalled by what he didn’t learn before he landed in a classroom, he wrote a book about it and published it himself.
This week, there’s a heartening conversation about reading, writing and thinking brewing in The Discourse, and many of us are saying things like ok, thank goodness and finally. If you haven’t done so already, go read Kelsey Piper’s great story “Illiteracy is a Policy Choice” at new Substack publication The Argument—she wonders why blue states haven’t followed the Mississippi Miracle playbook in reading. You’ll recognize some of her key sources.
Matt Yglesias tackles the 2024 NAEP scores in his story “American students are getting dumber,” and gets input from experts (again, great and recognizable to we Bell Ringers) on what exactly is happening in the American education system, examining everything from accountability to curriculum. Yglesias even gives a shout-out to the lack of whole books in class, and Karen Vaites explains to him why financial incentives keep excerpts in classrooms. (Vaites and I discuss this whole books/excerpts debacle on this episode of The Bell Ringer podcast.)
There’s a lot about student reading in Derek Thompson’s essay “You have 18 months,” also at The Argument. It’s about how “technology is affecting our capacity to think deeply right now.” He notes that students are reading less, and writing less, due to technologies like AI, and that it means that students, and adults all of us, are doing less thinking.
Thompson writes:
“The demise of writing matters, because writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. This is as true for professionals as it is for students. In ‘Writing Is Thinking,’ an editorial in Nature, the authors argued that ‘outsourcing the entire writing process to [large language models]’ deprives scientists of the important work of understanding what they’ve discovered and why it matters. Students, scientists, and anyone else who lets AI do the writing for them will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.”
This leads to, in my mind, the apotheosis of this week’s Discourse: “The dawn of the post-literate society: and the end of civilization,” by The Times columnist and Cultural Capital Substacker James Mariott. There’s so much that’s quotable in here, and there’s so much to think about, you’re going to have to go read it yourself.
Finally, I love that Dana Goldstein at The New York Times is asking for parents and students to fill out a form about whether they read full books in high school, presumably to give this important issue the splashy NYT treatment (which it deserves). But hey, you read about what’s happening in classrooms months ago right here at the little old Bell Ringer.
Maybe The Discourse will get the public talking and thinking about how teachers’ work has never mattered more.
How one math teacher’s training went so wrong
A one-year intensive graduate program yielded little practical knowledge on teaching, but a lot of fuzzy thinking on “equity,” says one high school math teacher
(Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Teacher was published on June 30, 2025)
Earlier this year, a survey from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) found that many future teachers don’t learn enough foundational math, either content or teaching techniques, in their university prep programs. Many future teachers aren’t getting adequate credit hours in foundational math concepts (numbers and operations, algebraic thinking), which is a problem, since so many say they’re bad at—and even afraid of—math.
The NCTQ survey also found that graduate programs in particular seem to really be dropping the ball in helping teachers both learn the math they need to teach and how to teach it.
“Only 5% of grad programs meet or approach the credit minimum in math content, and the vast majority spend less than a single course credit teaching future teachers the foundations of arithmetic and whole number operations needed to teach elementary school,” according to the survey.
Since that report dropped, I have been working to figure something out: if future teachers aren’t learning math in training programs—what are they learning?
Here’s my first attempt at trying to answer that question. A few months ago, I met a high school math teacher who told me his graduate school training—a nationally recognized teaching program he completed in 2021—spent more time on issues of social justice and vague strategies to achieve “equity” than they dedicated to learning actual math or math teaching. According to Yellow Heights—a pseudonym the teacher requested to protect his identity—even courses that were supposed to ostensibly be about math, courses like “Teaching for Learning” and “Content Area Methods,” often didn’t contain much actual math or teaching techniques at all, but often focused on other aspects of education, which we will get into below.
Frustrated by the experience, Heights, who was an award-winning math student in his home country of China, and later a software engineer and manager at Microsoft, wrote a book about his experience, Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Math Teacher. In today’s letter, I interview Yellow Heights about his experience, what his grad school teaching courses were like, and what happened when he landed in a high school classroom to teach math.
After verifying the authenticity of his education and experiences through photos and other evidence, I agreed to share this interview anonymously. The teacher and his family, like a lot of Americans right now, are increasingly worried about the temperature of our online and offline discourse, and are concerned about retaliation at work and in their community.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The Bell Ringer: Why did you want to write the book? Why now?
Yellow Heights: When I was attending the classes of the education school, there were some incidents there that made me totally flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe this was happening in the U.S., because I have lived here for 20 years. I read about it [how teacher training is often uneven], but I thought—it’s fantasy.
