Hangar Talk: A Narrative Exploration of Place-Based Math and Science Methods for Rural Educators

Introduction

If you came across my professional website, you might assume that I am confident about my general knowledge of the world. I am an author and professor who specializes in literacy, a commercial pilot, marathon runner, hiker, and gardener. I fix up old houses and install drip irrigation systems. In my mind, however, I still feel like a country bumpkin with a spotty knowledge of basically everything.

I feel particularly unsteady whenever I try to adopt language in math or science as the words feel as if they belong to someone else. Never mind that I have always loved all creatures great and small, or that I harbor a geekish interest in subatomic particles. Indeed, I have triple checked my knowledge of every discipline-specific term in this essay, because my lived experience—along with over 1,000 hours of guiding an airplane over These United States, dodging lightning and herds of pelicans—does not seem adequate enough for me to discuss something as simple as air density. While flying on instruments, I have imagined myself moving along a vast Euclidean plane inside of the Unit Circle, and yet I find myself wanting to write, “I do not do math.”

As a person who grew up on a ranch, I feel a kinship with my university students who mistrust themselves as they begin to analyze and quantify abstract relationships as they prepare to teach them. Black Hills State University has the unique ability to draw students from rural South Dakota, where altitudes exceed populations. Indeed, as of 2017, South Dakota ranked as the third most rural state in the nation with nearly 74% of its schools designated as rural (Showalter et al., 2019).

At this writing, I have worked with South Dakota teaching candidates for ten years, and I have noticed a pattern, semester after semester: students who can speak with authority about the plants and animals of the plains—about crops and seasons and rangeland—but suddenly balk at a discussion of soil pH. This is not because these students lack intelligence, but, as I will suggest, access to an identity that would use such language.

You may notice a lumping of scientific fields in this essay, along with a sprinkling of mathematics as if I were making a stew. I take this approach partly because the parsing of specialized domains is obviously constructed and not how we become acquainted with the world. And there is the fact that scientific fields can have iffy boundaries. Take water, for instance. The same substance necessary for hydration after your workout is the same substance that will, in different temperatures and environments, optimize osmosis or crack concrete. It is the same weird substance that can exist in the atmosphere in a supercooled liquid state from 0° degrees C to -40°. And, boom, if this stuff does not glom onto an aircraft once it completes the nucleation process, turning your miracle of modern flight into a rather non-aerodynamic blob of ice. The sciences eyeball each other across a crowded bar, trying to determine who will take the next chair, sidling up to each other and brawling, with mathematics hunkered smugly among them, knowing that everyone is going to chat them up sooner or later.

Even as a child, I knew that flowers had their own geometry and symmetry, along with favored patches of earth. Spiders and snowflakes had geometry, too, as did ants, which you could watch all afternoon as they marched past your feet, simply because you left a trail of Wonder Bread crumbs on the step. As I had an abundance of time for such activities, I wrote books about ants and marketed them to my parents, hoping to score a sale against my brother’s rival publishing company, whose blockbuster, Satchafrat Worm, sold three copies, enabling him to purchase a geode at Bennie’s Rock Shop.

Despite growing up in a place where I had a rich and daily dose of nature, I somehow convinced myself that I had no business taking science courses by high school—particularly those in the “hard sciences,” which I took to be a marker of their difficulty. There were Mrs. Stanley’s words as she reported my progress on multi-step multiplication problems in the 3^rd grade: You went berserk. But, there was more. My reservations about pursuing topics in science and math came from a lack of self-efficacy, coupled with a sense that such topics were simply not relevant for someone like me.