John Urschel, The Big Book Of Tell Me Why, And The Making Of A Football Star Turned Math Evangelist

“It started with The Big Book of Tell Me Why,” he tells me over zoom during the pandemic fall. John Urschel, a former guard for the Baltimore Ravens, is about to complete his PhD in mathematics at MIT. He’s also a Trustee at the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), the only math museum in North America. Math and football, he says, are two things he likes and is really good at. Not a lot of people can say the same, and I wanted to understand more about this intriguing combination in a person now passionate not just about math and football but also about bringing more young people of color along on the journey to solve big questions with math. He has made that his life mission.

Research shows that a student’s success in early math skills is a predictor of success later in life and is associated with a greater likelihood to graduate from high school. Students who learn math early and well are set up for success not just in school but in the workforce. Math has become even more crucial in the past few decades, as more and more jobs require math- and STEM-related skills; those jobs also pay better and offer more opportunities for upward mobility. 

John’s math story began when he was 7 or 8: “My mom was an attorney,” he explained. “When I was too little to be left home by myself, I would stay for after-school activities, and my mom would pick me up and she would take me to night court with her. She had a book – The Big Book of Tell Me Why — and I read it every night.” Here he goes to the bookshelf and gets it. The zoom square fills with its image: It’s dog-eared and has a shoe print on it, “from being in the trunk,” he explains. “‘Who invented sign language? How does an octopus move? What is an asteroid? Could there be a collision of the planets?’ I am in my own little world, immersed in the book.”

The tremors of the pandemic caused a national tsunami of lost learning and lost connection for kids, something all families are working to recover from. As a result of structural conditions that long predate the pandemic, many Black, Latinx, and Native American students lost even more learning time than their peers. These students were more likely to attend school virtually, meaning they received less consistent and less rigorous instruction. Compounding this, during the pandemic, researchers found that students received less instruction in math than in English Language Arts, especially in the early grades. Yet early math instruction is the foundation on which all later math and advanced science and engineering is based. Missed math instruction is of particular concern in these early years. 

Earlier this year, 100Kin10 interviewed 20 math-loving teachers and school professionals who have dedicated their careers to teaching math in joyful, relevant, and rigorous ways to low-income Black, Latinx, and Indigenous pre-K through fifth-grade students, exactly those students who experienced the most disruption in the 2020-21 academic year. Several of their insights for how to best support foundational math learning in this post-pandemic time (captured in a short report, Reigniting Joyful, Rigorous, and Equitable Foundational Math Learning) mirror John’s early experiences and provide a roadmap to teachers and school leaders looking to reignite passion for foundational math among teachers everywhere. 

First, it is no coincidence that John’s story starts with his mother and a book. One of the radical insights of the pandemic — known to great educators for millennia but often absent from school design — is that learning really is a partnership between student, teacher, and parent/caregiver. 

Second, the pandemic pushed the personal into the school, and this was an improvement. Teachers, zooming into their students/ bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, and makeshift learning spaces, learned more about the daily lives of their students than they ever had before and became aware of the barriers that families were overcoming and the types of jobs that their families had, and how these impacted stress and their ability to support their children’s learning. 

Third, teachers emphasized the importance of keeping joy front and center. STEM can facilitate critical thinking and real-life problem-solving. 

What John wanted was to see the unsolved problems of the world, and somehow he got it in his head that he could use mathematics to solve them. “I came to believe that math could help me solve big problems because it’s the only universal language we use to describe and interact with the world around us,” he said. But “it’s easy to miss if you’re not paying attention.” Math shows up in the engineering of the houses we wake up in, to the technology in the phones we obsessively check. It’s all “fundamentally based on mathematics,” he mused. “It only makes sense, then, that math should be one of the fundamental tools for solving our biggest and most pressing problems.”

As a kid, John told me, he was always good at math, but it wasn’t until college that he came to recognize math as a calling. Yet those early years are the key. If he hadn’t had joyful and relevant math experiences as a young child, he could never have gone on to do the physics, engineering, and math that led him on his path. 

Here is a nice (mathematical) syllogism: IF everything in the world around us is built on math, and IF math in the early years is the foundation on which all further math learn is made possible, and IF, to solve our planet’s biggest challenges, we need all of our country’s learners, Black, Brown, Indigenous, White, of all genders, abilities, and orientations . . . THEN we need all our schools to create the conditions for joyful, rigorous, and equitable math, especially those that serve our Black, Latinx, and Indigenous young learners and that have, historically, been the least resourced to provide that kind of math learning.

Empowering young people of color to pursue careers in STEM is John’s life mission. His partnership with MoMath is because, as he said, “it’s very hard to dream of being in a career if you can’t relate to anyone who’s actually in that field. One of my main goals in life as a mathematician is to increase representation of African American mathematicians.” John is a testament and model to young kids just emerging into themselves that “there are people just like them who are successful mathematicians.” And because of his work, more kids of color are on their way to joining him.