The Urgency of Math

By Kimlin Johnson Founder & CEO of B-RELYT Math Collective (BMC)

October 2, 2026

There is no such thing as new math. One plus one equals two. Period.

I will never forget teaching an after-school class and asking the students for the solution to a problem. A student gave an answer, and before I could say a word, the classroom teacher jumped in: “Close.”

Close? There is no close in math. You get the answer. It is exact. That is the whole beauty of it. Two plus two is four, and if you wrote five, you are not close. You are wrong, and we are going to figure out why, and then you are going to get it right.

Here is my problem.

My husband and I have been teaching math in this community for almost ten years. More than 750 students have come through our programs. So this is not theory. This is what we see every fall: students walk in who have never been sent home with consistent math homework. A lot have never been asked to memorize a multiplication table. And math drills? Out the door. Somebody decided homework was too much. Somebody decided memorization was old-fashioned. Somebody decided drills were boring. And then we sit around and wonder why scores keep falling and why students are lost.

They are lost because we took the map away.

Math is the gatekeeper to a student’s future. It decides who gets into the engineering program, who passes the nursing exam, who can read their own paycheck and their own mortgage. If we are serious about opportunity, we have to make math a priority. Not a slogan. A priority.

The part that stopped me

My friend Alice at the LA STEM Collective sent me a commentary in EdSource this week, and one passage stopped me cold. The author, Kyndall Brown of the California Mathematics Project, describes teachers “teaching from an old playbook”: covering the rules for fractions without ever teaching what a fraction is, so that years later, when students hit trigonometry, there is nothing solid underneath them.

Now, I’m the drill lady. You might expect me to push back. I don’t. Memorization is the floor, not the ceiling. A child counting on their fingers to find 7 times 8 has no brainpower left to think about what the problem is asking. But rules without the why are a house on sand. If a child can flip and multiply but nobody ever showed them that 3/4 means three of four equal pieces, then the day they meet a rational function they are staring at a fraction with letters in it and nothing to hold on to. That is the exact moment a kid decides, “I’m not a math person.”

Here is what I think happened. Somebody said “memorization isn’t enough,” and the system heard “get rid of memorization.” We did not replace drills with understanding. We replaced them with nothing. Now our kids can’t do the procedure and can’t explain the concept.

The answer is both. Know your facts cold.

Know what they mean. That is what my husband and I did at our kitchen table with our two kids, and it is what we have done with 750 more.

What BMC is doing about it

We founded BMC almost ten years ago because we wanted to bring math to the community and give underserved students the same foundation we gave our own two children. Who knew math would turn out to be the emergency.

Our programs. Nearly a decade. More than 750 students. Every week, real math in front of real kids. And here is what we have learned: our students don’t just come back to BMC. They start thriving in every class they sit in, because a child who knows they can do math walks into everything else differently.

The B-RELYT Review. Our first magazine issue is out this month, September 2026. A copy is $15, and we mail it to you. To get your copy, please email info@b-relyt.org and we will bill you.

The BMC Math App. Our biggest release yet. We are building it for school districts, but parents, you do not have to wait on your district. You can subscribe and have your child doing math one hour every day. One hour. Every day. That is how a foundation gets poured.

How you can help

Math is urgent because it cannot be crammed. You cannot make up eight years of missing foundation in one summer. Every day a child goes without it is another day of interest piling up. And compounding, by the way, is math.

Ten years. 750 students. We are just getting started, and we cannot do the next ten alone.

Get the magazine. $15 puts the first issue of the B-RELYT Review in your mailbox and helps us print the next one.

Give. Your gift keeps the drills going, gets the B-RELYT Review into students’ hands, and gets the Math App into more districts. No amount is too small to keep a kid at the table.

Meet with us. Whether you are a district, a school, a company, a foundation, or a parent who wants to know more, give us thirty minutes. We will show you what ten years of exact answers looks like. Contact us at info@b-relyt.org.

Make math a priority. Not close. Exactly.