CHM176. Everyday Math, Everyday Faith with Margaret Shawver

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Christian homeschool Mom's Podcast. I have an excellent guest today. Her name is Margaret Shaver and she is a mom, a wife, an engineer, an educator, and an entrepreneur. She's all of these things and she tries to demonstrate both in a way, all of this in a way that will add to God's world in the body of Christ. She is going to be talking to. Us today about the things that she does helping moms with homeschooling through math and so she is just going to share about herself. I'm just going to ask you to introduce yourself and welcome to the show. Margaret. Thank you so much for having me. This is a really new journey for me, like opening up about my experience to other people. I think as moms are. Co workers, are our children, and we don't know very much often get a chance to talk to other moms. So this is a huge experience for me because. I'll be talking to all the other moms listening to this podcast. So I'm Margaret. I'm an engineer, as you said, and an educator and a wife and a mom and a daughter of God. Yes, all those things are so important. To me. You know, I became a Christian when I was seven. I officially accepted Jesus into my heart at that time. But I grew up in the church. As you and I were chatting, I grew up evangelical in the presbytery. So you know, we have a presbytery, a body of elders and you know, deacons and so a very organized religious structure. So I was, you know, baptized very early, so that the church is a very large. Part of my life and before seven. And I mentioned that because in the pews at church, when I was trying to amuse myself, I would take the pencils apart and then I would put them back together, or the pens or any pens that my dad had in his suit jacket pocket, I would take them. Yes, And if that's not sort of an early scene of my whole life. You know, God on one side, building the world on the other side. And I've been so lucky, so blessed to be born in this era when I was allowed to. Pursue those interests at all in a. You know, in a structured, accredited institution, not just helping the women of my community fix their things, you know, in the Bible certainly talks about women of influence, but I'm very fortunate to be here. Went to engineering school, built place for Boeing. You know, I am a mom, I'm an old mom. I put my career very much first. I'm an only child. You know, I don't know if that's part of it, but I really God really had me on a single path. And I really thought that I was going to be someone's crazy aunt, you know, which I can't really be because I don't even have brothers or sisters, right. I had one brother, yeah, yeah, and I was old, yes, so I was thinking, what's this going to be like when I'm older? But now I have a. Brother sixteen years younger than me. But I understand completely just the only child syndrome. And yeah, yes, I never felt lack in any way. But I really had my first love God, second love engineering and math. I thought, well, this is going to be my path, you know, going to church, going to Boeing, you know, that was really what I thought I was going to be doing. And how did God sort of shift your direction? And how did you get into math? Teaching math? Right? So in so I did a lot of things and it happened very organically, as most of God's some of I think a lot of God's plans do, although now that I say that, he's certainly just come down with a bolt of lightning. Every now and then I've been like, hey, take a left, and I'm. Like, okay, you know. But so this this happened. I was at an empty place, which does not mean to say that teaching was a last resort. It was not. I had been tutoring outside of Boeing for some time. I think coming from engineering school and then going to the engineering workforce, it's actually pretty much a downgrade in terms of work. You don't know what to do with yourself past five pm. So I started tutoring and that was great. So then when I was at an empty place in my. Life, and the network in your town, right the small town, the mom's network, another mom reached out to my mom and said, hey, this private school is looking for a teacher. You know, has Maggie ever considered, which is what I get called still by my mother. Has Maggie ever considered, you know, teaching science and math. I think she'd be good at it. I started, and then just from there so I spent four years there, and then I've subbed on and off and then gone back to engineering a little bit. And now I'll be starting actually full time at a Christian K through twelve. High school coming up in the fall. So my son and I are going to be going to school together together. That's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, So you'll be teaching math at your son's school. Thank you. Yeah, I'm really excited. Thank you. Wow Wow. Okay. So, now, as far as how your faith is kind of shaped the way you teach math, is there some type of I don't know how I want to say, but like a connection between your faith and mathematics and the way you present it to your students. Absolutely, you know, in a secular environment. Even though we were certainly allowed to mention our faith background in the classroom, that was not a part of the school, and we had faith backgrounds of all different types, including many atheists and many secular So now I'm so looking forward to speaking about my relationship with God in context with my with my relationship with math right, and my relationship with how the world works. I am one of the I have loved learning the language of the universe. For me, math is the language of the universe, and it's obvious to me in everything that I look at. You know, tulips grow in this like beautiful like up shape, right, like a tulip shape. It's it's called that for many other tulip shaped things. That's how iconic it is in our minds. That happens in a per in a parabolic shape. That's a parabola. Why equals X squared. That happens because they fight against gravity and then they eventually reached there like they can't support themselves anymore, and so they begin to lip down. And again that all happens against gravity, which is a parabolic acceleration, and that's why they have that shape. I never would have thought of it that way. Apple trees, new branches come off, and of course this symbol that we're so used to, right, especially as Christians, this. Is a parabolic shape. It happens because the tree branches grow off the trunk again against. Gravity, and that's what makes that parabolic shape. Bees build hexagons because they are the strongest shape in geometry. They're the strongest shape of the way that the force is distributed along those angles. They're completely equilateral, right. They don't build triangles, they build hexagons, the other. Say, but that's a whole different story. So it's everywhere I look, I see the language of God, and that's never it's never stopped being true for me. Wow. If this is what. We can understand, and calculus was just invented five hundred years ago, very recently in the time span of humanity, what new math tools will be invented next that we will eventually teach to high schoolers. Right, calculus used to be so advanced it was invented, and then five hundred short years later, even less four hundred short years later, I would assume it's being taught to seventeen year olds now in the future. What math tools are we going to invent that allow us to take advantage of heat loss, energy capture, and better. Use God's universe? If we understand this tiny amount, how much more vast must God's languages be? Amazing? That's amazing. I've never heard mathematics explained in that way before, So it just it makes it. It's like it's art. It's art because when you were describing the shapes the hexagon and the parabola, and it's it's science and it's art. It's all of the subjects, it's all integrated. That's super cool. Well, that's how the world started, right, the whole world was integrated God spoken into being. If we can find those creative connections, you know, I think we're all the richer for it. Yeah. Absolutely, that's amazing. Well, thank you for sharing that, Margaret. A lot of homeschool moms struggle with teaching mathematics, especially when you talked about the graphic. And the variables all of that. Right, So how are you explaining this to your students to help them understand graphing and that relationship between numbers instead of just memorizing steps. You know, we were taught to memorize our you know, our formulas, But how do you teach it? That's a little different. Well, don't knock formulas, you know. I'm old schools certainly, but you nailed it right there. You said the relationship between two numbers, and we as humans have relationships with each other. You know, someone does something, someone else does something else. And so some of my experience is teaching at an all girls' school, and I felt very comfortable with bringing up relationships. Right. Everyone knows a high school couple where the girl does something and then the boy just spirals around her. In that case, X is the girl, why is the boy? It is a dependent, independent variable relationship, and I've found that to be talking about variables as related to each other, thinking about how we are as humans. You know. And then the as we were talking earlier about how nature and physics are related, and about how physics and geometry in particular are related. I found I just found that to be as helpful as it can be. And then the more real world examples, you know, I think my answer is, it's not one thing, right, it's talking about that from a variety of angles until something clicks exactly, is not one and done so pulling. In all the different aspects. And then also keeping in mind that math is just a part of a greater system that God created. And just I love how you again once again you gave us the visual of the art of nature and mathematics. So how how can moms like integrate this into their everyday homeschool journey just kind of like the systems approach, And then how can we teach math in a way that actually clicks for our kids? That seems like it should be the easiest question but I really find it to be the hardest because homeschool is so automatically integrated, which is one of its absolute best qualities. That you can in the same lesson touch on math Leonardo da Vinci Italian Renaissance, are the printing press at the city. Just a few years later right by the way, also the invention of calculus. Now you can throw that in there. Even as a person who sees the world like that, I would, I still struggle from the prescribed nature of homeschool that we are doing. This, this, this, this and this, and in the classroom too. I have a checklist and then I go off on some beautiful lecture and at the end I have to hope that my checklist and my lecture somehow aligned. And you know, and that's. Not the kind of teacher that I want to be. I want to be the kind that can wrap beauty around the prescription. I love it so but it's so difficult. So maybe what mama should do is give themselves a break, because I am here to tell you that s certified, practiced teachers also struggle with that. Yes, and you have not gone to college for this, or maybe you have, but you haven't spent years in the classroom. This is not your job writing on the line, and so don't first of all be easy on yourself. Oh yeah, for sure. Second of all, I think, don't hesitate. I know homeschool is full of resources, but don't hesitate to look for you know, I think other biblical resources about you know, the Arc of the Covenant, for example, there's quite a lot of math in the Bible. You could build an arc, a model of the arc. Right in your homeschool project. You could time the amount you could for electricity and magnetism, which is even in middle school math. You could heat up water in your thousand what microwave or fifteen hundred what microwave and you can measure out one hundred milli liters of water and then with the time does it actually take this much? So you can calibrate your microwave. Right. Cooking a great example of division, fractions, conversion factors when you go to the pump and you decide to go to this gas station versus that gas station. And the thing about homeschool moms is that they are with their kids so much of the time. Yeah, yeah, it can be hard to power yourself through to answer another discourse on why you're at this gas station. My three year old kids asking me why I turned left or why I turned right. But I am not google Maps. I don't wish to like I don't wish to monologue my drive in the car to the Starbucks, which we go to quite often. But those examples narrate. That's the word I was going for. Can we just had Okay? Those examples are showing off our reasoning to kids. And if a mom runs a household that's not going broke, the roof's not leaking, the cars sometimes have gas in them, and everyone's fed, then you're already making great mathematical, logical decisions. And if we can expose that to our kids, it's a struggle. I'm just going to circle back. Be easy on yourself. Teachers don't do that any better than you do. Right, Take it easy, And I love that you've integrated just our everyday life. Right. It's what we're doing every day, making those logical decisions and taking care of what's going on in the home, and so it's not all about us having to know every subject perfectly right, And then we have people like you who are so just focused on doing what you do so well. You're an engineer, and you have created a differentiated graph paper. I believe so. I want you. Yes, I'm seeing it right now on the screen for those of you who are watching on YouTube. She's holding it up. It's beautiful. I want you to tell us about it, and then like, what kind of inspired you to create this graph paper? Why is it differentiated? No, those are easy questions to answer. So, as I said earlier, getting maths to click for all students, not just students who aren't good at it, but really all students. You have to come at it from a number of angles, no punish intended, but you need several different approach points, and you're always going to I'm still learning math today. One of those ways that I came up with during my master's thesis was this kind of approach. It is quite subtle, as you can see. Until I get it really close to the camera, you can't tell, but the vertical the y axes, the vertical lines are red and the horizontal lines the x axies are blue. Okay. One of the hardest things as a math teacher, students get so fatigued graphing and they mix up their x and their y coordinates, they mix them up, and that can send a kid into the wrong answer or the wrong train of thought. The relationship is so crucial and it has to go one way. X changes, then why changes? And so this visual cue, and again you can see it's very subtle. It doesn't jump off the page. Pencil can easily be read on this graph paper, but it's strong enough that you can think to yourself. X is blue, Y is red. Yeah. And when I tell parents that, they're like, no one's done that before, Like that's literally that. That's the answer that I get so often. Why do it has no one thought to color the axes two different colors? Yeah? One is because it's more expensive. You have to print it as a picture. So until I get some sort of dedicated printing facility, that will be difficult. Right now, I work with this great US manufacturer done in New Mexico, I think, and they're great, but they can just print within the confines of their you know, the machinery that they already have. You need a machine that would imprint the lines I see, which is how normal graph paper is done. Anyway, So I call it differentiated because you know, it's very helpful for kids that have. Visual tracking changes, right, they might have a hard. Time dyscalcula dysgraphia any of those. If they have a hard time assigning visual to mathematical values on the paper and there's some transcription error there, then that visual Q can be really helpful. But I find it helpful all by itself because it really cuts fatigue, you know, every time I take it place as people say, well, are you serious, no one's done this. Yeah, I'm surprised that no one's done this. Say I'm black. You know, X and Y access and differentiate the color, make it easy. Especially today, there's so many more people that are expressing their need for these types of resources because of dysgraphia, right, and it's. Just it's just struggled. No one even had a name for it, and now so helpful. Now we can just use cheap tools, not to trivialize it, but. Load technology, low fi tools. Here is a piece of paper where the flat lines and the tall lines are different colors. Right, so how can parents get access to those materials? It's at Walmart, Wow, only at Walmart dot com. But I don't find that to be that onerous. It's you know, you can't go to your local store and pick it up. But I don't know about you, but by local Walmart, even though it's great and it's a large supercenter, it doesn't always even have everything that's supposed to be on the shelves. So you know, online it's always there. Okay, perfect, perfect, Yes, at the end of the show, we're going to make sure we get like the the the notes for that and just like the links will drop those in. But people, when I ask you a couple more, two more. Things, I want to ask you about kind of your balance, how you're balancing life as a mom, a wife, an engineer, and educator, all these things. And then you know, homeschool moms are also carrying that load of balance as well. So what which you offer to homeschool moms? Boy, they are too, you know, And you know, I think it's such a wonderful Biblical model because this idea that moms had a defined full time job outside of the home, I think is fairly new. It's not that there haven't been you know, storekeepers and weavers and artisans of all kinds that in the Bible mentions people, you know, mentions women in particular women business women. But I think that the homeschool model of integrating the kids into your daily life and integrating their lessons into your daily life is I think it would be so much possibility for joy, even though I know it's so much fatigue. So to answer your question, I sounds so cheesy, but I'm just going to say it anyway. I feel like God is putting me in this place and at the end of the day, that's what matters. That's what matters. So framing, but there are very practical framing framings that I use. One this mom once said to me that she was having sleep problems and she was in the middle of the night. She was yelling at God, saying, why are you causing me these sleep problems? How am I going to perform my best for my kids? And then the answer, obviously, God spoke to her saying, that's not your problem. It's not that I that she needed better sleep to perform at her best, and she somehow had to control that. It was that it was God's. Problem how she was going to perform for the kids, and if she couldn't, God would have to take the. Reins, and he was fully prepared to do that. Right. It's not that we need to perform at our best. Biohackers, I think have this idea and I love my supplement store. Right on a worldly perspective, I'm all. About good health and good sleep, but that's not the end goal. The end goal is that God has control of my life and if if I miss a preschool thing or but and that's easy to say, you know, and Oswald Chambers is one of my heroes. I'm Scottish, right, and he's Scottish and I find, you know, my utmost for his highest. I find his devotions to be very helpful. It's not today the devotion was. It's in the fire that we find ourselves. We can't find ourselves in monotony, we can't find ourselves in pleasure. We find ourselves in the fire. Wow, I know. That's that is That's that's pretty deep. We find ourselves in the fire, and that's where God shows up. That's where we get our aunt, that's where we receive the peace and to get through to the other side of what we need the strength and the energy to get there. So I guess my other question for you is, I know that moms are feeling overwhelmed by mathematics, but also other subjects, you know, and especially if the child is struggling. What's one thing that you would recommend, Being that you are an entrepreneur in mathematics and you're an engineer, you're an educator, what would you recommend they do to kind of bring a little bit of joy back into teaching that even if it means integrating outside sources outsourcing, but just something that they can do to bring joy back. Wow. Bringing when you're in the trenches and in the fire, it's one thing to say that you know and see. There I am. I just gave really good advice. But now I'm trying to think of some human level of control that I can offer to moms. Right what a trap that can be? Yeah, I think you said it. I think mixing in outside sources, outsourcing, asking other moms, you know, seeing if there's a co op. I think just trying, just trying, trying, try and trying. The Bible and other meditations are so easy to read, but they happened in the past. We know how it worked out. When you're in the. Trenches, you don't feel like it's ever going to work out, I think, But it took hundreds of years for Jerusalem to rebuild right, several tries, so many enemies, so many wars, and a body of work is easily condensed into the book of you know, the greatest Biblical project manager of all time, like as PMS. You know, I love that book. But it's easily condensable into a montage. But it's not a montage, not in your daily life. It is. I think you have to remind yourself to keep trying new things. I think that's where the joy is for me. That the world is huge. Yeah, yeah, try new things, try new things, outsource, get help, get support. Don't try to do it all by yourself. No, definitely don't. Because you have this whole podcast. There's lots of podcasts dedicated to this. Moms should not be writing themselves hard that they're not a math genius and not a math teacher expert. Right, absolutely, And that's why we have people like you to help us develop resources to support us. So I'm grateful that you're on the show today. I need for you to share with us where we can reach you. I know we can go to Walmart and get your graph paper, and so I'll just share how we can. Maybe there's a way on your website that we can order as well. Wow, yes, there is, so I'm on I have an Etsy store, and I also do you know, I'm on TikTok and I have a Beacon's page so you can find me directly. And I think I'm on there as Maggie Shover or market Shower. You can see that I'm not a marketing genius by any means. It's I just want to make stuff that is useful for people. And that's you know, in a niche that I that I want to add value. Right, this is this is my jam. If I could drop into every mom's household from Alaska to Florida and help hold hands and help coach. Math, you know, boy, I would. I would. But in the until that's possible, I think that there's tons of other educators out there who are just as good as I am. Right, someone in. Your community, someone knows someone. There's always more to learn. So going back to the original question, you know I have a TikTok in which I often do math problems on there. Actually those are more high school math I do. Yes, That's how I got started on TikTok is over COVID doing math problems for my students. So if TikTok I Etsy. That's right. I have an Etsy store. It's called working mom Labs. Okay, working mom Labs. And then so those are the two main places we can reach you. It's that's it, Okay. My place is very cool, very cool. So I will get these dropped in the links so that in the show notes so we can check it out. And I am just so excited. And also, congrats on your teaching job this year. God blessed, good luck all the things this year for you as you're embarking on this journey with your son, so that'll be fun. Thank you so much. I can't wait to go to school with him every day. That's amazing. We're going to be in different rooms for sure, but just knowing that I can run into him in the halls, you know, I just I'm really excited about that. Yeah, that's perfect. Well, Margaret, you have been a blessing to us today. Thank you for encouraging us on mathematics and taking a load off, helping us to learn to take that load off and to get help when we need it. I appreciate you absolutely. Thank you for having me