Maggie MacPhee is passionate about math - not just learning and teaching it, but also examining it through a social justice lens and changing the narrative around its history. She joins Best of the WWEST producer Vanessa to get nerdy about math and board games, but also to talk about how she as a busy math teacher early in her career deals with stress, what books she’s reading, and what her favourite part of teaching math is, punctuated with lots of laughter.

(Please excuse any audio hiccups in this remotely recorded interview.)

Guest: Maggie MacPhee (Twitter)

Maggie MacPhee is a grade 7-12 mathematics teacher in Nova Scotia. Maggie studied Mathematics at Mount Allison University before completing her Education degree at St Francis Xavier. She is starting her Masters of Education in September at Mount Saint Vincent University. Maggie’s favourite math topics are graph theory, board games, and social justice through mathematics. When she's not teaching or learning, Maggie loves to spend as much time as she can by the ocean looking for sea glass and shells. 

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Relevant Links:

• Building Thinking Classrooms
• The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics (book)
• High School Mathematics Lessons to Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice (book)
• Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe (book)
• Maggie on Twitter
• Minister's Island
• Mount Allison University
• Mount Saint Vincent University
• Saint Francis Xavier University
• Settlers of Catan (board game)
  
  

Hosted by: Vanessa Hennessey
Theme Music: “Positive and Fun” by Scott Holmes
Produced by: Vanessa Hennessey

We acknowledge that Best of the WWEST is hosted and produced on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Best of the WWEST is also produced on Treaty 6 territory. Best of the WWEST has featured many guests and has been hosted and produced by people of different lands, countries, and cultures, but we also acknowledge that we are settlers on this land. We are grateful for the privilege to be working as visitors on these unceded and ancestral territories of all the Metis, Inuit, First Nations, and Indigenous people that call this land home. We acknowledge and reflect on the harms and mistakes of the past and to consider how we are and can each, in our own way, try to move forward in a spirit of reconciliation and collaboration.