LEHI, Utah — It was the last class before Thanksgiving break, and high school math teacher Sarah Gale was dishing out more than her usual lessons on data science. “I can smell it,” said one student, ...

After years of assigning the kind of homework she had done as a student and observing students’ disengagement with it, a teacher overhauled how she assigns math practice.

Plenty of our childhoods had at least one math teacher who made the (ultimately erroneous) claim that we needed to learn to do math because we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our ...