2023 Annual Report

08 Apr 2023 Annual Report

A-B-Change

There is a little alphabet-game you can play to test your vocabulary. You take a four letter word and change it, letter by letter, into a word that means something opposite, but with each word in between still making sense. For instance:

LACK – SACK – SICK – SILK – SILT – SIFT – GIFT

By changing the word, letter by letter, you have moved from lack to gift. We can extend this: by changing a word or two, we can change the meaning of a sentence:

“What do you lack?” can change to “What is your gift?”

By changing words, we can change our conversation. We can move from:

“What do you lack? What can we (or they) do about it?” to “What is your gift? How can you make a difference?”

In MathMoms, we work together toward changing our communities by changing ourselves, and changing ourselves by changing the way we think and talk about ourselves. MathMoms is not about a “we” wondering what “they”  (leaders, politicians, other people) are going to do to make things better. It is about “us.”  It is also not about “some of us”  (mentors, for instance) who are the experts and who will make things better for “the rest of us”  (the Moms and the learners).  We all need to learn and we all bring gifts and wisdom into the conversation we share among ourselves. We are all searching for the best way forward and we all have some light in us to show us the way.

We aim to improve our learner’s mathematics by our tutoring. We also aim to impart important life-skills through building significant relationships in which our learners are seen and heard and respected. But in the process, we learn from our learners, and we discover the ways in which they have gifts to give. Perhaps that is the most important gift we can give them: to take their gifts seriously in a world where those gifts are so easily overlooked and even denied. In the same way, our mentors work with the Moms to improve their skills in tutoring Maths and to enrich their lives in various ways, especially by helping them to discover their own resilience. But every mentor is also in a learning process, learning from our Moms, being enriched by the Moms giftedness. And so, along the way of our ordinary work, we change ourselves and we change the conversations we have.

A conversation about what we lack, and how we expect others to do something about it, creates despair, disillusionment and passivity. A conversation about our gifts, about the difference each one of us makes, creates hope. That is the conversation MathMoms strive to live by.

Read more about how we are trying to change the conversation in our 2023 Annual Report, which you can download below.

Sonja Cilliers

MD: MathMoms