Her kids do well in those subjects but I don’t get the feeling that they would have chosen engineering as a profession unless pushed by their mother. She told me her own mother was the same way with her even though my client is in Finance (not engineering).
Her kids may resent her mother pushing them into a certain field but I think my client doesn’t care that much as long as they have good careers and job prospects.
Maybe I’m too soft on my kids letting them study whatever they want lol.
We expect kids to learn how to spell correctly. That is memorization. They need to know the difference between two, too and to – or – they’re, there and their, right? They need to know it. The same should be for Math. Learning the multiplication tables should be the same thing. They need to know it.
We had a teacher in grade school for my oldest who actually said "math was hard "and later "some girls have trouble with math"Are you kidding me??? My kid checked out on that teacher quick.
We never relied on school math, it took my kids literally 30 seconds to complete the homework. We called it 30 second math. I’m thankful kids learned math as a foundation. Now that they are older, they are far advanced. Without any prep they have always scores in the top 99 % on standardized tests. They took SAT/SSAT and other tests with zero prep and did exceedingly well. What is going on that people accept their kids not learning the basic math they need in life?
Teachers in our old school district had the parents by the ears and they parents could not get them to disengage from teaching math in “new” ways. In 2 or 3rd grade they taught my kids to subtract in order to add. I told my kid, don’t bother with that. That is dumb and no one else in the world does that. Why would you ever take two steps when you can do one? Do it the normal way, write down the answer and if they ask patiently say yes I know how your approach works and I reject it. Never happened again.
Parents would not accept their kids not learning to read and they should not accept them not learning to be math literate. It’s possible for everyone.
I never memorized timestables though I was supposed to. I can add/subtract really fast in my head though and that is how I got (and still get) through. In fact the “new math” is exactly how I always did it in my head, so it doesn’t bug me.
@Happytimes2001 What is “subtract in order to add” and what is “the normal way”? I’m pretty sure I use several different methods, including some subtraction, when I add numbers in my head.
Same here, in the early grades. Then I kept careful watch as the kids got older.
An example of subtracting in order to add:
You want to add 92 and 8. Subtract 2 from 92 to get 90. Add 2 to 8 to get 10. Add 90 and 10 (friendly numbers!) and get 100. My kids do this for mental math a lot and are much quicker at it than I am.
Reading the article, this is not even finalized let alone adopted and says there will not be any particular curriculum proposed or change in math facts. Math may be math, but there are varying paths to get to the right answer. I never learned lattice division, but my kids did (not saying that was a good thing but that math teaching is not static).
As to spelling, kids learn to read and spell phonetically as well as by memorization. When I see or try to spell an uncommon word, I am typically sounding it out. when I do math in my head, I often use the techniques of grouping that was not really taught to me,. With the use of calculators everywhere, understanding math is much more important than rote memorization of math facts. The requirement to show your work and use the method being taught is the lesson which is why kids get marked off if they don’t use the technique required.
Learning the origins of math as multi-cultural is not in and of itself bad and showing kids cultural diversity in mathematicians/computer scientists is a good thing. I don’t believe this will in any way replace learning math facts. The fuzzy part is how math is culturally insensitive. Apparently, (thru google) there are some social justice issues in the way math is taught. If the goal is to reduce stereotypes and empower kids (especially poor inner city kids of color) to learn math, that would be a positive goal. I don’t think Seattle or anywhere is proposing to eliminate the teaching of math facts. If you google social justice math, standards and testing are emphasized, along with social justice goals.
@mom2and For me and my kids, I don’t want teachers spending math time trying to teach “social justice math” whatever that is. Time spent on each subject is precious. And there is plenty of time that teachers spend on history, English and all the rest. Math is math. Believe me any math whiz kid will be empowered. They will have time to spend on all the rest. Kids don’t have to dig deep to see that math is at the seat of all cultures. No culture is math poor.
@yucca10 You might be younger than me. Actually I went to Montessori schools so I use a base 10 system ( which is now used in some other schools). Kids use whatever math they learn.
@Happytimes2001 I actually went to school in a different country. I really don’t remember how I was taught to add, and I wasn’t really into DS’s elementary math, so just being curious here.
You can believe that learning the multi-cultural origins of math will be helpful, you can also believe that number sense is very crucial, but… if you can’t easily do basic addition, subtractions, multiplication, etc., in your head, Algebra is going to see you struggling to keep up. Doesn’t even matter whether you’ve been taught enough math history to have an informed opinion as to which dead, old, white guy developed calculus - Newton or Leibniz - you’ll never keep up.
Math will set you free to live a better, more prosperous life.
Social justice studies? Not so much.
The topic here has meandered away from Social Justice Warrior Math (the table someone provided on Seattle Math Ethnic Studies was a bit frightening) to how best to teach math. I’ve studied a lot of math (PhD in applied math field).
I used to be a professor and found that motivating why we are learning something did in fact help the learning. One of the best teachers I’ve ever seen motivates the teaching of trigonometry with its nautical origins in a way that was very effective.
It is clear that in the US, we have discouraged women and likely that we have discouraged non-Asian people of color (never sure if POC includes Asians or not) from math in some ways. It could be that some motivation on the origins of math might make the mental investment more exciting for NAPOC. To the extent that Carol Dweck’s growth mindset theory hasn’t been discredited for lack of replicability, maybe knowing that your ancestors helped created the beginnings of math might motivate a growth mindset.
Developing automaticity is likely a good thing for doing algebra and (if one doesn’t want to use the calculator on one’s phone) for comparison shopping. On using timing as a measure, I’m a bit skeptical. My son is slow at I/O (learning disabilities) and was kept out of math enrichment (until I found out about it) because he couldn’t do enough multiplications fast enough. He is really strong at math – other students went to him for math in an extremely competitive grad program in computational and mathematical engineering. He would certainly have been among the top few in mathematical talent in his HS, so speed may not always be a good metric for capability.
While I’m sympathetic to motivating why one should be interested in a subject and why one should work hard, some of the stuff in that curriculum is hard to make sense of and harder to justify spending time on. For example: “Power and oppression, as defined by ethnic studies, are the ways in which individuals and groups define mathematical knowledge so as to see “Western” mathematics as the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence. This definition of legitimacy is then used to disenfranchise people and communities of color. This erases the
historical contributions of people and communities of color.”
That the origins of math in things like counting were non-European seems pretty unobjectionable and it is pretty well-known that algebra was developed in Baghdad or Alexandria. I have no idea what the Seattle ethno-mathematicians mean by defining non-Western math as illegitimate. Does anyone know what they have in mind?
I have felt that math was one area where talent was separable from identity (although Ivy League faculties frequently were reluctant to hire Jewish professors even very famous ones until well after WW II). That presupposes access to the education that enabled very bright kids from disadvantaged families to excel in math. Blacks in the South were, to take one group, systematically denied that access as are very poor people in many parts of the world. But that is a function of societal discrimination/oppression or poverty and not discrimination against forms of non-Western mathematics.
Exactly. Because doing elementary calculations quickly is not math.
However, PONC have no problems with learning Al-Gebra and APOC have no problems with Calculus. Go figure.
A concrete example of stereotyping in math would be a hypothetical word problem like this:
Now, it should not be hard to see that such a problem brings some stereotypes into the classroom, both ethnic ones (based on the ethnically suggestive names, the example implies that the probable American student is a worse student than the probable Indian, Chinese, or Russian students) and gender ones (none of the names suggests a female student).
Too far fetched? It seems that something similar in terms of insulting stereotypes pops up every so often, with teachers getting into trouble for using it: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/math-test/ .
Another example: out in the real world, presumably well-educated-in-math people used an ostensibly neutral math-and-statistics-based algorithm but fed it data that injected unwanted factors reflecting economic and racial bias into the analysis, resulting in biased recommendations: https://www.statnews.com/2019/10/24/widely-used-algorithm-hospitals-racial-bias/ . Perhaps some people could have used better instruction on how to use math to get the intended result, rather than pulling in unwanted factors.
A couple of thoughts the hypothetical math test questions. First, It’s not the math it’s the way the question was asked. So we should educate our teachers about this. BTW, are these the same teachers that get defended every day as under loved and under paid?
The data induced bias issue is a real thing that’s getting quite a bit of needed attention. Ensuring that the best data is used in training algorithms is very important. But be ready, because even when the best, most broad data is used it may not give you your “intended result”.
But science has show, ‘you can’t fix stupid!’
@catahoula +1,000% or more, since we are talking math. Lol.
Grade school arithmetic is math, but it is only a small subset of math. I hated, hated, HATED the timed tests, but learned my times tables. Not everyone will reach the same level, but all of us can do better with hard work and practice, which doesn’t have to be fun.
The practical application of this arithmetic is “word problems” or “story problems”, depending on where you were taught. Using math to solve real world problems, like dividing up apples or pizzas or whatever. Or trains leaving from opposite coasts. These were where I brightened up and had great fun. Other students loved the drills but hated the word problems. Again, hard work and practice can help people get better at these, even though not everyone will get to the same level.
And teaching schools and school administrations should encourage teachers who think it’s ok to be “not good at math” or “hate story problems” to seek other ways to earn a living.
For me, those word problems were a distraction. Why were going on a train from Chicago to Denver? And why were people from Denver going to Chicago? And why did it matter when the two trains would pass one another? Unless… were they on the same track? Was there going to be a collision? Was this a conspiracy to get rid of a Russian spy? Who convinced them to buy those tickets in the first place? Why were they even taking a train when a plane would have been faster? And why was the person from Chicago wearing a green hat?