Math isn’t racist. Math isn’t sexist. Math isn’t xenophobic. Math isn’t an “ist”. Because math simply “is”. Teachers and students need to leave all that “ist” stuff at the door and get down to learning math. This is actually pretty darn important for a kid to be competitive.
If they want to make it relevant, how about teaching that so much of how a kid functions today, iphone, instagram, snapchat, spotify, laptop in their bedroom acting as a tv, gaming, etc. are all possible because of math.
Exploring roots of math is not math. That’s humanity subject not math. That ain’t going to teach how to do math itself. Are they going to teach basketball players the origin of the game and expect them to win a game?
This whole idea of math itself as inherently a tool of oppression is a straw man argument. (Which is to say, the thread title is inflammatory and since I don’t see any of the proponents of these curricula actually saying that.) The point is that any subject, no matter how pure and “sacred,” can be TAUGHT in ways that are more accessible to students in the majority group/culture and that potentially exclude non-majority students in ways that pollute the inherent cultural and ideological neutrality of the core content. ( @ucbalumnus gave some great examples ). Furthermore, as ucbalumnus also pointed out, K-12 math has ALWAYS been taught with an eye toward application and making math “relevant” - and there wasn’t an outcry about that until people started questioning what kind of cultural content was and was not embedded in that “relevance.”
If we acknowledge that math PEDAGOGY has evolved in ways that can throw up unnecessary barriers, how are we to address that? Well, either we strip away the baggage altogether and teach math in its purest form, or we add content and context to counterbalance what has been out of balance in the past. These educators prefer the latter. Some in this thread prefer the former, and that’s an absolutely defensible argument… but I think there are students of all backgrounds that will find the subject hard to engage with from that perspective. (And as MusakParent points out, it will be tough to find teachers who can do this well.) In a perfect world there would be multiple options to meet multiple needs. But just defending the status quo on the grounds that math teaching is immune to bias is a hard position to support given all the evidence to the contrary.
Math is apolitical as it gets. Let’s leave it alone.
Trying to politicize math-teaching is trying to solve debilitating societal problems (generational inequalities in access to quality schools/teachers/resources of all kinds) with a tiny bandaid. It won’t work and will only further drain energies from already stressed/poorly compensated public school teachers.
SMH!
— If you know how to apply math to wherever it may be usefully applied.
Like most essential skills, this needs to be pointed out to the young by those who do know. Time spent doing that seems better value than twisting off on an inclusiveness angle.
Could be completely wrong, though. This nifty new idea may accomplish what the last 30 or so years of new and better instruction hasn’t done.
So this will be the newer, new math.
And I know how all the countries in the world are always kicking our butt in x and y, our education system is broken etc. We have so many problems and we are so broken.
I just want to say somehow we always seem to win a lot of Nobel awards and are usually considered the foremost leaders in emerging technology. Medical breakthroughs too. CS leaders etc.
We also have hundreds of thousands of great students trying to get into all of these great American universities. I don’t see a huge amount of flight outside of the USA for higher ed. Seems to be an inverse situation. Just a little counter balance to the constant arguments about our flaws.
You really need to know the situation on the ground now - who is working in the US in science and technology. Mostly immigrants and children of immigrants, many of whom got additional math enrichment out of regular school. As long as skilled immigration continues we will be fine. More and more of this work is also being outsourced abroad. Nobel prizes in science and technology have a 30 years lag. They will follow the same pattern - most will go to immigrants.
The question is what will happen with the “Learners” from the “Communities of Color” and from the “Communities of No Color” with the math curriculum like that. They will know that the multiplication table was invented near the Lake Chad but will not know how to multiply? For many people the math instruction was the first and only way to learn abstract thinking and how to think clearly and logically. Even if they do not use math in everyday work this kind of training helps. Now there will be no right or wrong answers so math becomes pointless. Even Soviets left the math alone and did not claim that the math was collectivist. But now it will be. Total collapse.
"This whole idea of math itself as inherently a tool of oppression is a straw man argument. (Which is to say, the thread title is inflammatory and since I don’t see any of the proponents of these curricula actually saying that.) "
To me this curriculum is inflammatory.
The claim may be that the teaching of how to apply math in K-12 math courses may be “uninclusive” or otherwise undesired (e.g. in the choices of examples for “word problems”, such as those in reply #12).
The notion that K-12 math courses teach (or should teach) only pure math is not grounded in reality, since part of their goal is (or should be) to teach students how to apply math to other subjects (not that they are necessarily that successful at that).
There’ve a number of attempts in the past to “modernize” math teaching and none of them succeeded. The ability to abstract and generalize is essential to be good at math. It’s a fact that kids aren’t equally good at math skills, just as they aren’t equally artistic. Attempt to “democratize” math will inevitably end up in failure.
Yes, we still produce more Nobel Prize/Field Medal/Turing Award winners, despite our overall poor K-12 STEM education because a) many winners are immigrants or children of immigrants (we still attract the best from all over the world); b) there’s time lag, as pointed out above; and c) the best students don’t rely on our K-12 system, especially in STEM.
That’s a pretty big “if”. Can you explain what you mean? Can you provide some examples of the ‘evolution’?
Would you be so kind as to link some of the evidence (as opposed to anecdotes) to biased math teaching?
“Nobel prizes in science and technology have a 30 years lag. They will follow the same pattern - most will go to immigrants.”
About 35-40% of past US STEM Nobel Prize winners are foreign-born.
Here are examples:
Telling girls they aren’t good at math while encouraging boys. Giving girls who aren’t succeeding at math a pass, while giving extra tutoring to boys. Allowing boys to bully and exclude girls in things like robotics and math clubs.
Sorry fang, but while awful, none of those examples are new, which was the question, i.e., what has evolved in pedagogy to “throw up unnecessary barriers” (and that this new Seattle policy is trying to address)?
btw: bullying is just that, by reprehensible brats. It is not pedagogy (from a teacher’s plan).
@aquapt Your post (#22) is terrific.
Girls / women have been told not to bother with math for many many yrs. That was way more prevalent in the 40’s and 50s when women who were fortunate enough to go to college were told no to math and yes to teaching and nursing and that’s about it. Society has come a long way since then. Diversity programs exist at many major companies to try to get women early access which is a good thing (I feel - even though it makes it more challenging for my son).
I come form a long line of educators (both sides of the family going back at least three generations) and the women were all steered to teaching. One outlier became a mechanical engineer and was one of a very few women in her program both at school and work.
There are way more women in STEM fields today than just twenty yrs ago. The bullying argument is ridiculous. There is way less bullying of women today AND since when do we change curriculum because of bullying? How about dealing with the bullies?
@tanbiko, I saw NO indication of the alarmist conclusions you reached (your post #28) in the article you cited. None. I’m scratching my head as to why you find it so “appaling”. Are you SURE we’re talking about the same article?
My D, born in 2000, was told by an educator that the all girls HS she was touring didn’t have AP calc and AP physics because “girls don’t like those subjects.” She has also had to fight for lab time in HS and still in college. There are still plenty of people who subscribe that engineering isn’t for girls.
I guess I was lucky. Nobody ever suggested to me that engineering isn’t for girls, and I majored in it.
If teachers want to talk about math being appropriated by Western culture, blah, blah, blah, it should be in social studies, not math class.
Coincidentally, I was eating breakfast at a hotel this morning and started talking to a woman who is an 8th grade math teacher. She’s taught math for over 30 years. She said she thinks the new ways of teaching math are terrible. She purposely uses an old textbook in her class! And yes, she gets in trouble with the school administrators at times. 