Shelly M. Jones

"Every workshop always sold out and was sitting room only"

"It’s because teachers want to engage students and know how much they like music."

"Part of it is respecting and learning about the contributions different cultures have made to math in addition to Pythagoras — the one name people know"

"It’s also about wanting students to develop a positive math identity and not just see it as a procedure, but to realize that a lot of what they’re doing is math."

"Wow, math is everywhere."

"What does a math task look at when it’s both culturally relevant and cognitively demanding?"

"It’s an awesome book I really enjoyed doing"

"because we keep hearing about the achievement gap, often between black and white children. But for this book we focused on black children not from a deficit — not from what they don’t know — but from what they do know."

"I wanted it to be a math activity book, so I wrote bios about the women and made up activities to go with their math — fun activities that don’t need a teacher to teach it to you first. It’s a book that students can just pick up and do without a teacher, maybe while riding in the car to grandma’s house."