Solving for Belonging: A GLP’s Guide to Teaching Math with Story and Sense
Reclaiming maths as human, inclusive, and grounded in the ways neurodivergent students think and learn.
A reflective journey into writing ‘The Story of Math’—a textbook rooted in story, clarity, and inclusion. Inspired by al-Khwārizmī, it reclaims maths as human, accessible, and deeply connected to culture and language.
Introduction
This summer, I’m writing a maths textbook. It’s not because I had spare time or a lifelong dream to become a curriculum author - again. It’s because my principal, in a moment of dry resignation, muttered the phrase, “There are no good learning centres.” She didn’t mean the physical spaces—we’ve got those, for what it’s worth. She meant the curriculum: the materials. The content. The bones. I knew exactly what she meant. It landed like a dare.
I’ve been trying to find something—anything—that meets the needs of the students who are sent to me. Students with IEPs, who’ve had the curriculum fly past them for years. Students who are learning English, who are expected to not only decode dense symbolic maths but do it in a language they’re still acquiring. Students who’ve internalised that the problem is them (aka, learned helplessness). And when I look at the offerings from publishers, I see a disturbing pattern: a race to the bottom. Content trimmed to the thinnest possible thread in the name of “access,” all whilst alignment to standardised tests is touted like a badge of honour. Except the tests themselves are broken. The entire assessment culture in the US has been in freefall for years—what used to be a measure of learning has become a lever of control. Districts obsess over metrics that mask systemic inequity. Textbooks are built around performance targets instead of pedagogy. And in all this, the needs of disabled students and multilingual learners are either tacked on as afterthoughts or erased entirely.
So, what do you do when the system is failing and the tools you’re given are designed for someone else? If you’re me, you write. You build what doesn’t exist. You pick up the dropped threads and try to weave something human. It’s not about being noble—it’s about survival. I’m autistic and a GLP. I live by patterns, by story, by coherence. And I’ve come to realise that my brain, wired as it is, keeps finding solutions to problems that weren’t meant to exist in the first place. The neuro-majority breaks something—usually in the name of efficiency or profit—and I, like so many other autistic educators, start patching things together with truth and narrative and whatever scraps of dignity are left.
That’s how I found myself thinking about a book written over a thousand years ago, by a man in Baghdad who saw maths not as an abstract puzzle for the elite, but as a language for everyday life. A book written not in symbols, but in sentences. Not to impress, but to explain. And suddenly I realised—maybe that’s where we start. Not with tests. Not with data dashboards. But with a story.
A Book from Baghdad
To begin again, sometimes we need to remember what was already known.
Picture Baghdad, not as it is on the news or in the imagination of empire, but as it was in the 9th century—at the height of the Abbasid Caliphate. A city of gardens and libraries, trade and conversation, rivers and roads. The Tigris ran through it like a lifeline, and across its banks stood the Bayt al-Ḥikma—the House of Wisdom. It wasn’t a university in the modern sense, nor a monastery of cloistered thought. It was a living, breathing centre of scholarship: a translation house, a think tank, a meeting place of minds. Here, knowledge flowed in multiple languages—Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Persian, Sanskrit—and scholars sat side by side, not to hoard wisdom, but to expand it.
Into this world came Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. A mathematician, astronomer, and geographer, he worked in the House of Wisdom not as a solitary genius, but as part of a vibrant collective. Their mission? To preserve, translate, and expand upon the intellectual inheritance of many civilisations. Al-Khwārizmī’s gift was synthesis. He didn’t just translate ideas—he transformed them, making them clearer, more systematic, and more broadly useful.
Around the year 820 CE, he wrote a book with an ambitious title: al-Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar fī Ḥisāb al-Jabr wa’l-Muqābala—The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. It was the first text to lay out what we now call algebra as a general method, and its title gave the discipline its name: al-jabr, or “restoration.” The method of restoring balance in equations by adding or subtracting the same quantity on both sides. Simple. Elegant. Human.
And here’s the part that matters most to me: al-Khwārizmī wrote his book in words. No symbols. No shorthand. Every equation was expressed as a complete sentence, every operation described so that someone with basic numeracy and access to language could follow. This was rhetorical algebra, and it wasn’t a limitation—it was a choice. It was about inclusion. It made mathematics accessible to those outside the elite scholarly class. Merchants could use it. Surveyors. Scribes. It was useful, usable, and designed with the real world in mind.
The more I read about this book, the more I understood: this wasn’t just a turning point in mathematics—it was a different philosophy of learning. One that begins not with gatekeeping or grandeur, but with clarity and care. It met people where they were, and trusted them to make meaning. And perhaps, in our rush to modernise and standardise, we’ve forgotten just how revolutionary that can be.
What Is Rhetorical Algebra?
In al-Khwārizmī’s time, mathematics was not yet the coded language of symbols we know today. There were no equals signs, no variables marked by letters, no shorthand to compress a process into an expression. Instead, mathematics lived in language—in the spoken and written word. This was rhetorical algebra, and its power lay not in abstraction, but in precision through prose.
Take, for example, a simple equation in modern form:
x² + 10x = 39
Al-Khwārizmī would have expressed this as:
“A square and ten roots are equal to thirty-nine.”
No symbols. No shortcuts. Instead, the components are named plainly: the “square” is what we now call x², and the “root” refers to x. The entire operation unfolds like a line in a story—a description of what is, not just what must be done.
For a long time, rhetorical algebra has been treated by historians as a quaint, transitional form—as if it were a stepping stone toward the more ‘sophisticated’ symbolic systems that came later in Europe. But I think that misses the point entirely. Rhetorical algebra wasn’t primitive. It was deliberate. It made mathematics speakable. It made reasoning visible. And perhaps most importantly, it centred understanding over efficiency.
In this form, mathematics becomes narratable. You can say it aloud. You can write it down. You can follow its logic in the same way you’d follow the steps of a recipe or the arc of a story. This is especially significant when working with students who process language differently—students who are learning English, who have disabilities affecting working memory or symbolic reasoning, or who, like me, are autistic gestalt processors. The sentence structure provides anchoring. The narrative flow offers continuity. And unlike the cryptic puzzles of modern problem sets, rhetorical algebra opens a door: This is what’s happening. This is what you know. This is what must be found.
It is not designed to filter out the unworthy. It is not a maze of symbols you must master to prove your intelligence. It is, instead, a tool—a functional, elegant method of navigating the world’s numerical realities. A method that says: “You are capable. Let me show you how.”
In returning to this form, I’m not indulging in nostalgia or romanticising the past. I’m reclaiming a pedagogy that understood something we seem to have forgotten: that clarity is not simplification, and that understanding precedes abstraction. If we want students to succeed in maths—not just to pass tests, but to think mathematically—we must begin with meaning. Rhetorical algebra gives us that beginning.
Seeing with New Eyes: A Personal Reflection
When I first recognised the shape of rhetorical algebra, it wasn’t through a textbook or a formal method. It was through my students.
In our learning centre, I work with secondary students who’ve been left behind by the mainstream system—all are in high school by age, but in practice, their maths skills sit somewhere across a wide primary school spectrum. Their learning profiles are spiky: strong visual memory but weak symbolic processing, excellent reasoning with spoken language but limited written fluency, gaps in foundational number sense paired with flashes of deep insight. They are not broken. The curriculum just wasn’t built for them.
To reach them, I’ve found myself defaulting—almost instinctively—to something that mimics rhetorical algebra. Not in a formalised way, but ad hoc, responsive, and deeply human. I write maths problems in full sentences. I narrate the logic aloud. I structure problems like stories. I ask, “What’s the story here?” and we work together to find it. A square and ten roots are equal to thirty-nine becomes: “There’s a number, and when we square it and add ten of the number, we get thirty-nine. What might it be?”
It isn’t efficient. It isn’t always neat. But it works. It holds their attention. It gives them an entry point. It lets them be curious instead of confused. And it gives us both a way to build meaning before building speed.
So I’ve come to realise that what I’ve been doing all along is not a workaround—it’s a rediscovery. A return to something older, slower, and more rooted in language than symbols. But right now, it’s scattered. It lives in notebooks, post-its, oral explanations, whiteboard sketches, and half-finished anchor charts taped to the back wall. It’s real, but it’s fragmented.
This is where the summer writing project comes in. It’s time to pull it all together—to create something coherent and whole. Not to replace the students’ core maths classes, but to supplement them. To enrich. To offer another lens, another path in. One that values where students are, not just where the pacing guide says they should be. One that remembers that understanding must come before abstraction, and that story might just be the most powerful teaching tool we have.
The Story of Math: A Textbook for Everyone
The Story of Math isn’t just a project—it’s a reclamation. A way of gathering everything I’ve been doing at the margins and giving it a spine, a rhythm, and a voice. I’ve spent the last year adapting on the fly—writing custom questions, translating symbolic tasks into full sentences, building vocabulary one word at a time. This summer, I want to bring all of it together into something coherent. Something that honours the gaps in my students’ learning not as deficits, but as invitations to build bridges. Something that treats the learning centre as a place not of remediation, but of revelation.
The book will span nine units, covering arithmetic through calculus—but it won’t follow the typical linear path. Each unit begins with a story—historical, cultural, or practical—that frames the mathematics as a living thing, something that arose from real needs in real communities. These stories stretch across time and continents, decentring the usual parade of white European names and drawing instead from Babylonians, Mayans, Chinese scholars, Arab mathematicians, Indigenous knowledge systems, and more. In doing so, the book becomes more than a curriculum. It becomes a permission slip—for curiosity, for connection, for conversation.
Because that’s really the heart of it. I don’t need my students to become algebraists. I need them to feel entitled to mathematical thinking. I need them to see themselves as part of the story. And rhetorical algebra, in all its clarity and rhythm, is one way in. Especially in the early units, we’ll lean on full-sentence reasoning: writing out steps in plain English (and Spanish + other languages as necessary), crafting “proofs” that follow the logic of my favourite scaffolded structure:
It says … I say … and so …
This isn’t just a writing prompt—it’s a doorway into Claim, Evidence, Reasoning. It builds language skills in both BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). It strengthens understanding through expression. It turns passive learners into active meaning-makers. And for multilingual students especially, it scaffolds mathematical fluency across languages without sacrificing rigour.
In some ways, this book is a spiritual successor to the “Basic Maths” classes I remember from my own childhood—classes that didn’t assume mastery, but that did assume possibility. That let you start where you were. But unlike those classes, which often came with stigma and low expectations, The Story of Math is built around dignity, not deficiency. It doesn’t water down content—it reframes it. It says: You belong here. Let’s begin with what you know.
And maybe, just maybe, it helps us all remember what we knew before we started pretending that speed and abstraction were the highest goals of learning. Maybe we come back to story. Maybe we come back to sense.
Not Just Method—Liberation
There’s a persistent myth in Western education that maths is a purely modern achievement. That it begins with the Greeks, reaches a pinnacle with calculus, and becomes truly “advanced” only once it loses all connection to the physical world. Abstraction is treated as progress. Decontextualisation as sophistication. But this story is a fiction. Worse, it’s a harmful one. It erases the rich, global, millennia-spanning tapestry of mathematical thinking in favour of a narrow, Eurocentric lineage that serves systems of gatekeeping far more than it serves learners.
When I look at rhetorical algebra, I don’t see a primitive predecessor to modern symbolic methods. I see a gateway—a way in. A form of mathematics rooted in accessibility, clarity, and usefulness, designed to empower rather than exclude. And when I widen the lens even further, I see that this spirit of gateway-thinking is shared across time and cultures, often appearing not in textbooks but in temples, sky maps, woven patterns, and rhythms.
Whether it’s the knotted quipu of the Inka, the base-60 place value of the Babylonians, or the lunar alignment of the stone circles across Scotland and the Americas, the underlying principles are often startlingly consistent. Even when number systems differ, even when cultures are separated by oceans or millennia, the human impulse is the same: to mark time, to measure the sky, to track pattern and change, and to express it in ways that can be shared.
Take Uriel’s Machine, the Scottish stone circle believed by some researchers to function as an ancient astronomical calculator. It tracks solstices and equinoxes with astonishing precision—just as Mayan pyramids do, and just as desert observatories in what is now New Mexico do. Are these maths? Of course. Are they “advanced”? Unquestionably. But are they recognised as such in most Western curricula? Rarely—if at all.
This is why The Story of Math is not just a teaching project. It’s a liberatory project. It’s a call to remember what was lost when the learning of numbers was divorced from meaning, culture, and purpose. It’s a refusal to pretend that Western notation is the only path to understanding. And it’s a reminder that the foundations of complex mathematics—pattern, relationship, structure, symmetry—are everywhere, from the harmonics of a flute to the shadow lines of a megalith.
So when I write word problems as stories, or when I guide a student through a sentence-long equation using their own logic and language, I’m not dumbing it down. I’m rooting it deeper. I’m building scaffolds not just toward passing grades, but toward ancestral intelligences—ways of knowing that saw no separation between math and music, between counting and carving, between teaching and worship.
Rhetorical algebra fits into this tradition. It teaches through description. It moves through language. It trusts the learner to think clearly before expecting them to compute quickly. And for my students—many of whom have never felt like maths belonged to them—that shift is radical.
To teach in this way is to say:
Yes, there is a place for you here.
Yes, your way of thinking is valid.
Yes, you come from people who did maths long before it was called that.
We don’t need to reinvent maths. We need to remember it—in all its forms, in all its voices. And in doing so, we might finally begin to repair the damage done by systems that mistook gatekeeping for rigour, and silence for understanding.
Invitation to Fellow Educators
I want to end with an invitation—not just to teachers in classrooms, but to all educators, wherever you may be. Because we know that education doesn’t only happen inside schools. It happens at kitchen tables, on late-night tutoring calls, during homework help squeezed in between jobs. It happens in sibling explanations, in community centres, in whispered encouragements from parents doing their best with what they remember. If you’re helping someone make meaning from numbers, you’re part of this work. You belong in this conversation.
So I ask you—what stories do we tell through our curriculum? What assumptions do we carry forward without question? And who gets left out when we frame maths as neutral, abstract, and apolitical?
The Story of Math is, at its heart, an invitation to rethink. To wonder. To remember. It’s one small part of a growing movement toward curricula that centres humanity, language, and belonging—especially for those our systems have historically pushed to the margins. If you’re doing similar work—whether that’s designing accessible content, integrating culture and context into instruction, or simply trying to make sense of it all alongside your students—I’d love to be in conversation with you.
Just like I’ve done with my previous books, I’ll be sharing pieces of this project as it unfolds. You’ll find upcoming posts right here on The AutSide, and you can always reach out via BlueSky (@jaimehoerricks.bsky.social). And because accessibility also means economic access, I’m committed to ensuring the final version of The Story of Math will be reasonably priced—something usable by teachers, parents, and learners alike without needing institutional approval or a departmental budget.
We build what we need. We teach what we were never taught. And together, we remember how to begin again—with story, with clarity, and with care.
Final Thoughts …
In the end, what I’m doing isn’t new. Not really. It’s ancient. And it’s kind. It looks back to something we’ve forgotten: that maths, at its core, was never meant to be a weapon or a wall. It was meant to make sense of the world. To solve problems. To name patterns. To share understanding across generations and across lands.
Sometimes I wonder—quietly, respectfully—about Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī himself. About how his mind worked. About what led him to choose clarity over cleverness, structure over status, plain language over pomp. I wonder if he, too, needed things to make sense—deep sense—before he could let them go. I wonder if his mind moved in shapes, in patterns, in wholes. If, across the centuries, we might have recognised one another.
Of course, we can’t know. It would be inappropriate to assign modern categories to someone who lived over a thousand years ago. But I do know this: his work speaks to me in ways that few things do. The synthesis. The precision. The quiet insistence that ideas should be understood, not just accepted. It feels familiar. It feels like home.
And so, as I write this book—The Story of Math—I do so not as an innovator, but as a remembering. A gathering of threads long scattered. A gesture toward what was always possible, before abstraction became a gatekeeper and story was silenced in the name of speed.
Sometimes, the best way forward is to look back. To pick up the dropped threads. To begin again, this time with care.
pedagogical
self deprecation