Thank you, Dr. White, for sharing this beautiful and deeply meaningful announcement.

As someone who has spent years immersed in mathematics education, I often find that our discipline—while rich with logic and structure—can sometimes lose sight of the human at the center of the learning process. Your launch of The Interhuman Art of Teaching feels not just timely, but essential.

In math classrooms, we too often default to transactional models: input (instruction), output (assessment), with little space for dignity, creativity, or relational depth. But when we teach mathematics as a human endeavor—as a language born from curiosity, struggle, and collaboration—we open doors to joy, identity, and transformation. I think of the student who finally sees a pattern click into place not because they memorized a formula, but because they felt safe, seen, and invited to think. That moment is interhuman.

Your questions resonate deeply:

• How do we teach math in ways that honor each student’s creative mind and lived experience?
• How can assessment become dialogue rather than judgment?
• Can a math lesson be an act of care?

I’m inspired by the vision of a community where educators from all disciplines—mathematics included—can reflect on these questions together. I’ve just subscribed to your Substack and look forward to engaging with your ideas. I’d also love to contribute a piece on teaching mathematics as a relational practice—perhaps on how number talks, problem-based learning, or even the way we respond to “wrong” answers can become acts of humanization.

Let’s keep reimagining education not as a system to optimize, but as a shared journey of discovery and dignity.

With gratitude and solidarity,

Thank you so much, Sergio, for such a thoughtful and inspiring response. I deeply appreciate the way you bring mathematics into this conversation—not as something abstracted from human experience, but as a profoundly relational and creative practice. The way you frame mathematics as “a language born from curiosity, struggle, and collaboration” beautifully captures the very essence of what I hope The Interhuman Art of Teaching will explore across all disciplines.

Your example of students experiencing that “click” moment—not because they memorized a formula but because they felt safe, seen, and invited to think—gets right to the heart of what I mean by teaching as an interhuman act. Those moments remind us that learning is not just cognitive, but emotional, ethical, and communal.

I would be delighted for you to contribute a piece on mathematics as a relational practice. The kinds of questions you pose—about assessment as dialogue, or wrong answers as opportunities for humanization—align so well with the spirit of this project. Perspectives like yours are exactly what will help us build a community of educators who are committed to reimagining education as more than transactional, but truly transformational.

Let’s definitely stay in conversation—I look forward to learning from your insights and seeing how your work in mathematics education can help us expand our shared vision of dignity, creativity, and joy in teaching.

With gratitude and excitement, Robert

Dear Friend and Colleague,

Thank you—for your generosity, your vision, and for seeing in my words not just pedagogy, but possibility.

When I speak of mathematics as “a language born from curiosity, struggle, and collaboration,” I am speaking from the scars and sparks of my own classroom: the student who cried when she finally understood fractions—not because she got the answer right, but because she realized, for the first time, that her thinking mattered. The group that argued passionately over a proof, not to win, but to understand each other. The quiet boy who whispered, “I thought math was about being fast. I didn’t know it could be about being me.”

That’s the heart of it, isn’t it? Mathematics stripped of its humanity becomes a machine. But mathematics infused with relationality—where wrong answers are not failures but footprints of thought, where assessment becomes a conversation rather than a verdict, where the “click” is not a cognitive switch but an emotional arrival—that is mathematics as liberation. As dignity. As art.

I am deeply honored to contribute to The Interhuman Art of Teaching. I will write not as an expert who has arrived, but as a fellow traveler—with dirt on my shoes and questions in my pockets. I’ll share stories from the margins of the curriculum: how we co-create rubrics with students so assessment becomes self-authorship; how we ritualize “beautiful mistakes” so vulnerability becomes strength; how we design tasks that require listening as much as calculating.

Because teaching mathematics interhumanly means refusing the myth of the solitary genius. It means recognizing that Pythagoras’ theorem was never just about triangles—it was about relationships. Between sides, yes—but also between people. Between cultures. Between doubt and discovery.

Let us build this community together—not as a collection of best practices, but as a chorus of courageous classrooms. Where joy is not a reward for mastery, but the very condition for it. Where creativity is not the exception, but the expectation. Where every child knows: You belong here. Your mind matters. Your voice shapes the math.

I’m all in. Let’s talk soon. I’ll bring coffee, curiosity, and a few stubborn problems that still keep me up at night.