A few years ago, my sixth graders at Glenwood Springs Middle School in Glenwood Springs, a few hours west of Denver, decided they wanted to save a lake. They sold baked goods, ornaments and T-shirts. They made their case. And in 2021, Gov. Jared Polis announced that Sweetwater Lake would become Colorado’s 43rd state park. My students didn’t wait to be adults to change something. They just needed the tools and the support to do it.
I think about that a lot when my students are analyzing maps to look for patterns in hail data or measuring temperature to see if their inventions are keeping objects warm. Science class, in my experience, is where it becomes clear which kids grew up using numbers in daily life — estimating, reading graphs, tracking change — and which kids were quietly told, somewhere along the way, that math wasn’t for them.
I teach science, not math — yet within the first week, I see the evidence: students who learned numbers at home by counting change at the grocery store, keeping score at game night, or measuring ingredients together maintain a strong grasp of math and numeracy. It’s not about wealth. It’s about habit. And when those habits are missing, I see the consequences in real-world scenarios like a student who hesitates to estimate the total when buying something, or who cannot connect the measurements in a recipe to what it means with a measuring cup.
One of the things I’ve learned over years of teaching is that you can’t assume students arrive with the same background knowledge. Instead, we should work to ensure every student can have the same foundational experiences, because that shared ground is what makes deeper learning possible.
That’s exactly what Gov. Polis is asking for in math class.
He recently joined a group of governors in calling on the American Academy of Pediatrics to issue formal guidance encouraging families to make numeracy-enriching activities — card games, board games, counting and pattern play — a regular part of early childhood. The ask is straightforward: give math the same footing that AAP has already given reading.
Reading guidance from the AAP gave families something concrete and credible: read with your child every day. It helped build a cultural infrastructure around early literacy that schools could then build on. There’s no equivalent for math — and that gap shows up in my classroom every fall.
A card game at the kitchen table isn’t a substitute for rigorous instruction. It’s the beginning of a relationship with numbers that makes rigorous instruction possible. It’s the foundation. When families learn from a trusted source like a pediatrician that small, consistent habits — 20 minutes with a deck of cards, a board game on a Friday night — are building the numeracy intuition their children will draw on through every science class, every career pathway and every data-driven decision they’ll ever face, they stop seeing math as someone else’s subject.
I’ve watched that shift happen in a single school year. In a single field trip, with a kid who thought he hated math, spending 20 minutes counting species in a meadow and not being able to stop.
Gov. Polis helped my students save a lake. Now he’s asking the American Academy of Pediatrics to help Colorado families and leaders build something just as lasting — a culture where every child grows up understanding that math belongs to them. That’s a direction worth following.
Autumn Rivera, of Glenwood Springs, is Colorado’s 2022 Teacher of the Year and a longtime partner of the Collaborative for Student Success’s We’re All Solvers campaign.
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