iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

And geometry logic problems about security guard or security camera coverage. #iteachmath #iteachmaths #mathsky

Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

workshop w/ 2nd graders today. my colleague calls me over: Hey CiCi, the kids at this table want to ask you a question. A: Are you a boy or a girl? Me: Oh! That's a really great question. What do you think? B: I think you're a girl. A: I think you're a boy. C&D: I think you're a girl. 🧵1/9

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

at a grad student writing retreat where they just offered some boxes up front in case anyone wants to "voluntarily turn in their phone to help keep themselves accountable to working." 🩷 so tickled that this feels so diff fr the taking-phones-away-fr-children admin have teachers do in our classrooms.

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

on thurs, i defended my dissertation proposal and passed. i'm way deep into analysis/writing rn, so it was more of a formality and a lovely feedback session. despite, i'd still procrastinated big time & was captioning my last video clip on the bus ride there... here's to all the moms in it 🩷

A screenshot of a passage of the proposal. The last sentence is highlighted. The entire passage reads: "Mehta was like me, a 1.5-generation Chinese American who, through her years of schooling, had found herself gradually distancing from her mother. She, like me, quickly assimilated to U.S. culture by attending U.S. schools as a child, while she felt that her mother held on to traditional Chinese culture. She, like me, thought that because she was more educated than her mother and spoke English better than her mother, her ideas were better than her mother’s. She, like me, got into huge philosophical fights with her mother during her childhood. It was through her video-cued qi ethnography project that Mehta learned that her mother does know things. And through a metaphorical thematizing of various orientations of her mother in her mother’s kitchen, Mehta was able to draw out her mother’s own epistemologies that were different from hers.
Mehta had started crying in the middle of her answer, and seeing her cry made me start crying too. I looked around the small conference room at the all-Asian looking crowd of presenters and audience members, many of whom were also trying to quiet their sniffles. I knew I wanted to—I had to—do what Mehta did, too. _How can I help repair the harm I have done to my mother and our relationship through the copious amounts of schooling I have received by attuning to the brilliance of her ways of knowing? If this dissertation is meant to demonstrate my knowledge, could I do it in a way that celebrates my mother’s instead?_"

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

poll for ppl w/ 2nd grader experience: do we let 2nd graders use glue guns in our makerspace activity? a) YES. if they burn, they'll learn! but pls say "glue squirters," not "guns." b) NO. lawsuit waiting to happen, or worse, crying children w burns that were your fault. c) other??

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

when you're headed to work to plan a 2nd grade making activity about pollinators and you've just put on a mask outside bc the irl pollen is out to take you down, THE IRONY IS NOT LOST ON YOU ... ah-choo

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

was co-planning w a teacher a project based off of @benjamindickman.bsky.social's "graph your name" activity. needed a provocation to get kids to start talking about names b4 graphing. this spoken word poem popped back into my head. how could i have forgotten! #mtbos www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvah...

youtube.com

Pages Matam, Elizabeth Acevedo & G. Yamazawa - Unforgettable

YouTube video by Button Poetry

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Reposted by Xi "CiCi" Yu

Howie Hua @howiehua.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

May the fourths be "with you"!

A circle broken into fourths and each fourth is labeled "with you"

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

i'm defending my diss proposal this thurs. starting on slides now and thought i'd dig up my first attempt at this... THREE YEARS AGO... omg how do ppl do academia for a living at this pace. title has changed, frameworks have changed, pronouns have changed, my mom has... changed.

A screenshot of the title page of a slide deck. Title says "The Ethnomathematics of My Magician Mother." Underneath, "Xi "CiCi" Yu // RS 750 Crafting the Dissertation Proposal // 04.18.2023" A row of tabs line the bottom: Overview, Introduction, Theoretical Frames, Literature Review, Methods. Slide deco is pastel purples, pinks, and blues.

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

this moment... i'd just asked my mom if the secret to a magic trick was brute force/practice, and she'd said yeah. long pause. she whispers/shows me the gimmick to the trick (it's not brute force; her mic still picks it up!), tells me not to write abt it, and then we both burst into laughter.

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

saw an ai-mediated professional modern dance performance at my local contemporary art museum this weekend. was deeply disturbed by it, not in a good way. i want to talk about it. not sure how to. i left the theater and opened my phone to the shooting stuff, so that was uh. interesting timing. 1/?

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

hot take: i'd rather be misgendered as "auntie" than be called the more accurate "pibling." esp. in the collective, e.g. "our aunties visited this weekend." i cannot stand the sound of "pibling" (for now).

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

saw this on the side of a duck boat today. just had to check... #ITeachMath #MTBoS #MathSky

The side of a Duck Boat with a picture of two red crewneck socks and the sequence of numbers in circles: 9, 4, 1, 8, 27, 6, 14, 45, 26, 34, 42.

A screenshot from the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences with the same numbers from the Duck Boat image queried. The result says "Sorry, but the terms do not match anything in the table."

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

i was kindly asked by my readers to tone down the grumpiness in my diss proposal... i just reread this, which i had written ages ago, but HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. yessss point taken. soooo grumpy. and sorry, toni morrison. 🩷

Screenshot from my dissertation proposal of a paragraph that reads: "While I do not have the space to rehash the class conversation we had about this passage—so forgive me for the looting I am doing of Morrison’s words here by reprinting them but not engaging deeply with them—I do want to highlight two phrases. One, is that in describing the violence that is language, Morrison explicitly states that “language limits knowledge,” and a few words later, refers to the language of the academy as “proud but calcified.” Calcified, as a quick Google search will tell me, means hardened into an insoluble calcium, as is characteristic of the process of producing a paper that will become calcified in the depths of Google Scholar." And a footnote that says "Or like the plaque that has been hardened into calcium phosphate on the insides of a PhD student’s teeth due to lack of dental insurance in this program."

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

sometimes my mom says something in an interview, and i have NO IDEA what she is saying. yesterday, it was the first magic trick in a "set list." sounded like “ran3pe4." i try googling it. nothing. i send the clip to @yumemhx.bsky.social. she's stumped too!! huh. oh wait, i have another angle...

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

from a dear friend: "i think to get more followers, you should clarify that you're 'currently dissertating about magic x math x DEAD mom'" 😆😭

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

today's transcriptions: my mom talks me through her journal that she uses to plan magic tricks for each performance. at the top of each page is the date (starting in 1987), location, potential audience. then, a "set list" of tricks for that performance. i ask her about the strikethroughs.

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

in the middle of transcribing/translating my 4th hour of interviews with my mom (directly from spoken mandarin chinese to english). i keep struggling to find an english word for "师父/shifu" that is not "master." even though i'm pretty sure my mom meant it as "master."

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Xi "CiCi" Yu @xyu119.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

hi. haven't known what to post here since i left twitter. i was in a good dissertation writing groove jan-mar this year, but lost it apr 1. i think i'll "memo" here as i work. ty for bearing with me as i try this out!!

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