A Numbers Game

Gliding from table to table in the Underhill Music and Dance Library, Annie Fetter ’88 was an animated coach—asking a motivational question here, encouraging a new approach there.

Gliding from table to table in the Underhill Music and Dance Library, Annie Fetter ’88 was an animated coach—asking a motivational question here, encouraging a new approach there. Her work as a math specialist for the Chester Children’s Chorus last summer was especially rewarding: She simply wants everyone to love math as much as she does.

“It’s a master clarifier that helps us make sense of the world,” says the bass player who majored in math and music.

But the problem is a lot of people do math without completely understanding it.

“People see math and music as these things that some people are good at, or some superpower they just have,” she says. “In fact, both are systems that can be learned and understood.”

Fetter is a founding member of Math Forum, which started in 1992 at Swarthmore through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. Though the online math community dissolved in 2017, she continues to consult and speak at schools and conferences nationwide.

“I’m focused on helping teachers incorporate more sense-making opportunities in their classrooms,” she says, “so that math becomes something students think about and understand—rather than something they finish as quickly as possible.”

These days, she is working on two NSF grants for STEM education; doing independent work with schools, districts, and state organizations; and leading sessions at regional and national conferences. Since 2015, she’s also volunteered at Math On-a-Stick, an area at the Minnesota State Fair featuring geometric tile games, a pattern machine, and other interactive exercises.

The unconventional approach of such programs helps children notice and talk about numbers and shapes in their everyday world, Fetter says. “It’s composed of activities that may well lead to mathematical thinking,” she says, “but there are very few tasks that have an answer, or even an end point.”

So, how does not having an answer help people learn to appreciate math?

“Kids persevere to build designs and patterns that they thought of,” she says, “often making them more mathematical as they play.”

The wonder they display dragging their finger across a sand-covered turntable and making a spiral or a more complex design is a sign they are connecting with the discipline. That fun will spontaneously lead to deeper questions of why and how—and reduce the fear of not knowing an answer.

Asking students to notice and wonder when approaching a problem is a method Fetter helped to formalize.

“I’m the ‘Notice and Wonder’ person,” says Fetter. “This makes me famous in a really small universe.” Fetter’s fairly well-known in the Swarthmore universe, too, coming from a long line of alumni including father Tom ’56, uncle, Bob ’53 (who won the 2018 Joseph Shane Alumni Service Award), and about a half-dozen others.

“While I wasn’t pressured to come to Swarthmore,” she says, “I know that my grandfather was thrilled.”

Swarthmore’s innovative environment informed Fetter’s whole approach to teaching. After graduating, she received a grant to work for Gene Klotz, the Albert and Edna Pownall Buffington Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, developing workbooks and computer-animated videotapes for teaching 3-D geometry. “It’s safe to say that while I would probably be a math teacher with or without Swarthmore,” she says, “I definitely wouldn’t be the educator I am without being part of that forward-looking community.”