3 ms·

In my opinion it's way worse than that. I was a middle class suburban white kid and it was not an everyday scenario to figure out when 2 trains were going to pa

by vitd 11y ago

In my opinion it's way worse than that. I was a middle class suburban white kid and it was not an everyday scenario to figure out when 2 trains were going to pass. While I do recall hearing a train somewhere in my hometown, I don't recall ever seeing it, let alone seeing more than 1 at a time.

lotharbot 11y ago
in this case, I'm specifically referencing circumstances where they've tried to write problems based on "everyday experience" -- not trains passing halfway through Kansas, but perhaps things like going to a shopping mall or a museum. Things that you think "that's just an ordinary part of childhood" until you spend some time in an area where a lot of the kids have never been to the mall, and the only museum they've ever seen was on a school field trip. Perhaps they don't know the term "supermarket" but they know what a "mercado" is, and they might expect very different products to be on sale from what the textbook author expected. The idea of "cultural competence" is about figuring out how to eliminate unnecessary cultural barriers -- to make sure that a kid trying to solve this type of word problem is working through the problem, and not getting sidetracked by the fact that they don't have the context to make sense of what it's even about.
- taejo 11y ago
  I once volunteered to help kids in a rural school in my home country with their math homework. There was a word problem in their textbook that seemed to hit every single possible cultural barrier. It was about budgeting for a couple. The couple had a difficult-to-read name in a language not spoken in that province. Most of the kids couldn't even read past the first sentence without stumbling, because of this. The couple in the problem probably earned about as much as all of the students' parents combined. Both of the people had their own car - while in this village there were about four cars total. The couple had no children, and didn't look after any family, while many of the students had children of their own, and anybody in that village who earned an income had a large family to support on it.

by vitd 11y ago

lotharbot 11y ago

in this case, I'm specifically referencing circumstances where they've tried to write problems based on "everyday experience" -- not trains passing halfway through Kansas, but perhaps things like going to a shopping mall or a museum. Things that you think "that's just an ordinary part of childhood" until you spend some time in an area where a lot of the kids have never been to the mall, and the only museum they've ever seen was on a school field trip. Perhaps they don't know the term "supermarket" but they know what a "mercado" is, and they might expect very different products to be on sale from what the textbook author expected. The idea of "cultural competence" is about figuring out how to eliminate unnecessary cultural barriers -- to make sure that a kid trying to solve this type of word problem is working through the problem, and not getting sidetracked by the fact that they don't have the context to make sense of what it's even about.

taejo 11y ago
I once volunteered to help kids in a rural school in my home country with their math homework. There was a word problem in their textbook that seemed to hit every single possible cultural barrier. It was about budgeting for a couple. The couple had a difficult-to-read name in a language not spoken in that province. Most of the kids couldn't even read past the first sentence without stumbling, because of this. The couple in the problem probably earned about as much as all of the students' parents combined. Both of the people had their own car - while in this village there were about four cars total. The couple had no children, and didn't look after any family, while many of the students had children of their own, and anybody in that village who earned an income had a large family to support on it.