ABSTRACT
From that private school I moved to Chicago Public Schools to teach high school mathematics. The high school, on the south side of Chicago, was a school within a school that enrolled students who had aged out1 of grade school that focused on students getting their eighth grade diploma. The population was approximately 95% African-American and 5% Hispanic, and 98% were from low-income homes. For the girls, that often meant they had been pregnant, were in unstable homes where they rarely went to school, and/or had spent time in jail. For the boys, it usually
meant they had been in jail and/or had an unstable home life or no home at all. I taught geometry and saw students for 90-minute periods five days a week-a long time for any subject, much less for students who had limited attention span and were not engaged with school. These students simply had not been acculturated to the norms and expectations of middle-class society; they were often in a perpetual state of emotional and physical crisis, and education was perceived to have little value in their immediate situations. I found origami to be a tool of engagement, through which students who typically did not perform well in school found application and understanding.
