7 ms·

Teaching College-Level Mathematics in Prisons [pdf]

100 points by vo2maxer 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago
> I also had to deal with a few correctional officers who thought inmates did not deserve to have this chance and refused to treat them like students. What a depressing outlook to have for someone who has authority over these people.
- hogFeast 7y ago
  Not to be even more pessimistic but you will find this happen everywhere you give humans authority over each other without full oversight. I have a friend who worked in a prison as a psychologist, somewhere with a generally liberal attitude toward prison, and guards would deny inmates medication, therapy, or (bizarrely) suggest that a diagnosis was incorrect (and often deny the first or second based on their own "diagnosis"). In my experience, some people are just born this way. Stupid to the core, and cannot handle being in authority without doing weird stuff. More oversight is needed. This isn't just prisons: healthcare, police, law, etc. (weirdly, you find this behaviour everywhere, even in high-skill professions).
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > Stupid to the core, and cannot handle being in authority without doing weird stuff. This isn't just prisons: healthcare, police, law, etc. And politics, most of all. Explains so much.
    - hogFeast 7y ago
      Where I am, there is a largely effective level of oversight within politics i.e. all lobbying/gifts disclosed, decent media coverage, public funding of political parties, etc. But yes, definitely an area where stuff can go very wrong. Obviously, the corporate world is another important omission...most places in the world have good laws around protecting shareholders but do the boards of public companies really put the hammer down...almost never. Probably lots of other areas I missed.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        Large corporations are ruled by internal politics anyway, not market mechanisms. It's a wonder that they manage to work as well as they do, despite that inherent source of dysfunction.
- flattone 7y ago
  I kind of understand it. From my experiences growing up around relatively hard stuff (first saw guns for sale in a backpack in 9th grade science class. This was my closest friend at the time, and didn't seem weird to me at all.) Some of the people we knew, friends of friends, were cooking hard drugs, in their mid 30s etc. One of them, or many, "dating" my friends middle school sister. It didn't take much to get a gun in your face just to emphasize the results of a debate. With this setting in mind my claim is that there are persons who are operating at their neutral/healthy. Not matter how many years of good behavior or words or programming or songs .. nothing per my experience removes the low bar option for gun in face. So it's difficult for me. I know people turn things around. I have. I suppose it looks like a sort of spectrum with different gravities to good/bad behavior depending on so many factors.
  - tdfx 7y ago
    I think this is what a lot of overly optimistic "rehabilitation" advocates miss. They seem to believe that if you provide just enough nurturing, opportunity, and understanding that people who act outside society's acceptable boundaries will be drawn back within them. They fail to recognize that you're not returning these people to something they deviated from, you have to create an entirely new worldview for them that they never had any experience with.
    - mlyle 7y ago
      On the other hand, if you make reintegration to society impossible, and eventually release prisoners... you know the outcome you're going to get. Plenty of societies appear to do much better than the US at preventing recidivism and reforming criminals to productive members of society.
      - ddxxdd 7y ago
        I remember a common saying that's bandied about Hacker News: a 10x quantitative difference is a qualitative difference. Well, America's violent crime rate is 10 times higher than Europe's violent crime rate, so make of that what you will.
- domnomnom 7y ago
  Yeah, well you're also not the one keeping people locked up in cages. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  You could imagine circumstances where the officers outlook was justified or not justified. I think judging them based on only this off hand remark about someone's perception of them is not merited. For example, suppose you knew that one inmate had repeatedly beaten his wife and child. While in prison he abused and threatened inmates and guards. You suspected he perpetrated the violent rape of multiple other inmates but can't prove it because the victims refuse to testify. You think he's in the class because he's bored. In this hypothetical, would it be wrong for some correctional officers to believe the notional inmate didn't deserve the chance?
  - posterboy 7y ago
    The point is, the officers did not deserve to make such claims. Not under the veil of ambiguity, nor pessimism. Your strawman is a fallacy. Suppose an inmate had committed a logical fallacy. Should they thence be barred from reason (reasoning?)? English isn't my first language, sorry. PS: You might say the hypothetically notional inmate deserved the offer, but wasn't eligable to go, though one had to wonder why. You might also say it was morally imperative for the officer to bring up charges, if they were sufficiently convinced, to instate conditions that would isolate the culprit from maths education, social interactions in general, and probably any hope of correction.
    - ALittleLight 7y ago
      I don't understand your comment. My point is, because you don't know the officers, inmates, or the broader situation, you shouldn't comment as to whether the officers are right or wrong - because you don't know. There are possible worlds where the officers are justified or misunderstood and there are possible worlds where the officers hold incorrect beliefs. What evidence lets you know which possible world is more likely? Being prejudiced against the officers strikes me as similar to the imagined (and possibly real) situation where the officers are prejudiced against the inmates. We, as readers, just don't know.
      - maxerickson 7y ago
        Your comment pretty much ignores the context of the statement about the correctional officers. You are basically saying "we can't tell a thing about the officers, but we know the author is a jerk for castigating them". Never mind that the author has all the things you want, the broader knowledge of the situation and so on.
- posterboy 7y ago
  read "deserve" in any sense that is active in more than the grammatic sense. Maybe they thought the inmates didn't want to, or weren't able to learn. More likely, we think the wardens thought the inmates were criminals. I'm not sure I deserve to know the difference.
DMac87 7y ago
For those in the SF Bay Area, you can have significant impact by sharing your time: https://prisonuniversityproject.org/get-involved/volunteer/ https://prisonuniversityproject.org/get-involved/volunteer/ http://asi.sfsu.edu/asprograms/project-rebound/ http://asi.sfsu.edu/asprograms/project-rebound/
gowld 7y ago
Note: The article is about the high-school math ("College Algebra" and "Finite Math", material covered in "Algebra II" and "Precalculus" in high school) that is taught in remedial classes in community colleges. From my perspective as a tutor of several students (one who was a libarian, another in nursing school), it's a very popular but strage class to offer, as it's of no use to the nearly students who take it after high school -- it's too abstract for those students, which is why they didn't learn it the first time they saw it in high school, and aren't going to use it in their careers as nurses or office workers or other community-college careers. "Business mathematics" and "personal finance" would probably be more helpful to these students. Of course, it's not the OP's fault that community colleges demand these weeder courses.
- posterboy 7y ago
  It's probably the thinking in your antepenultimate paragraph reinforcing itself. Instead, abstract skills can offer a gateway to the application of more rigid rules, so to speak, because it shows that they are strong, but the applicability is flexible.
  - orhmeh09 7y ago
    > antepenultimate paragraph “Second paragraph” is a simpler way to put it.
    - seisvelas 7y ago
      "Second to last"
      - lewilewilewi 7y ago
        "Third to last"
        throwno 7y ago
        His third to last paragraph is the second paragraph which is why it's stupid to use some wordy bullshit like "antepenultimate". You NEED to get Grammarly as the incessant ads say. To downvoters: Toxic pedantry like this is what drives women and minorities out of STEM. You're the reason we can't have diversity.
gigama 7y ago
"My students had such a fierce passion and thirst for learning the material. The continuous stream of questions during classes was a testament to their refusal to be satisfied by mere knowledge and to their incomparable commitment to achieve true understanding." Should be everyone's default position. "If you treat inmates like students, they will become students — and often they will surprise you and even become scholars. They will become inspiring agents of change whom we want to see out in our society." An A+ for Annie Raymond.
- globuous 7y ago
  Bernard Stiegler's story has always fascinated me [1]: "In 1987–88, with Catherine Counot, Stiegler commissioned an exhibition at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, entitled Mémoires du futur: bibliothèques et technologies. Stiegler defended his thesis at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1992. He has been a Director at the Collège international de philosophie, and a Professor at the Université de Technologie at Compiègne, as well as a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has held the positions of Director General at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), and Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM)." So in short, he has a PhD, became a professor, and ended being the director of a french research institute ("IRCAM is part of a consortium with Stanford's Center for Computer Research and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) in Berkeley, California." [2]) Before all of that: "Between 1978 and 1983 Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery, first at the Prison Saint-Michel in Toulouse, and then at the Centre de détention in Muret. It was during this period that he became interested in philosophy, studying it by correspondence with Gérard Granel at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail. His transformation in prison is recounted in his book, Passer à l'acte (2003; the English translation of this work is included in the 2009 volume, Acting Out)." [1] I find this so inspiring. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRCAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRCAM
  - tcbawo 7y ago
    Much (but not all) can be said for influence of one's environment and surroundings. Unfortunately, for most addicts and felons, there aren't enough resources in the world to give them all the opportunity for a fresh start. I'm all for second chances, but I would prefer spending time and money where it would be most effective, like early intervention and child care.
xvilka 7y ago
Would make sense to teach also the probability theory and, maybe, Python coding basics. To give them tools they can use after or even in the prison itself (in some cases).

100 points by vo2maxer 7y ago

> I also had to deal with a few correctional officers who thought inmates did not deserve to have this chance and refused to treat them like students. What a depressing outlook to have for someone who has authority over these people.

hogFeast 7y ago
Not to be even more pessimistic but you will find this happen everywhere you give humans authority over each other without full oversight. I have a friend who worked in a prison as a psychologist, somewhere with a generally liberal attitude toward prison, and guards would deny inmates medication, therapy, or (bizarrely) suggest that a diagnosis was incorrect (and often deny the first or second based on their own "diagnosis"). In my experience, some people are just born this way. Stupid to the core, and cannot handle being in authority without doing weird stuff. More oversight is needed. This isn't just prisons: healthcare, police, law, etc. (weirdly, you find this behaviour everywhere, even in high-skill professions).
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > Stupid to the core, and cannot handle being in authority without doing weird stuff. This isn't just prisons: healthcare, police, law, etc. And politics, most of all. Explains so much.
  - hogFeast 7y ago
    Where I am, there is a largely effective level of oversight within politics i.e. all lobbying/gifts disclosed, decent media coverage, public funding of political parties, etc. But yes, definitely an area where stuff can go very wrong. Obviously, the corporate world is another important omission...most places in the world have good laws around protecting shareholders but do the boards of public companies really put the hammer down...almost never. Probably lots of other areas I missed.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      Large corporations are ruled by internal politics anyway, not market mechanisms. It's a wonder that they manage to work as well as they do, despite that inherent source of dysfunction.
flattone 7y ago
I kind of understand it. From my experiences growing up around relatively hard stuff (first saw guns for sale in a backpack in 9th grade science class. This was my closest friend at the time, and didn't seem weird to me at all.) Some of the people we knew, friends of friends, were cooking hard drugs, in their mid 30s etc. One of them, or many, "dating" my friends middle school sister. It didn't take much to get a gun in your face just to emphasize the results of a debate. With this setting in mind my claim is that there are persons who are operating at their neutral/healthy. Not matter how many years of good behavior or words or programming or songs .. nothing per my experience removes the low bar option for gun in face. So it's difficult for me. I know people turn things around. I have. I suppose it looks like a sort of spectrum with different gravities to good/bad behavior depending on so many factors.
- tdfx 7y ago
  I think this is what a lot of overly optimistic "rehabilitation" advocates miss. They seem to believe that if you provide just enough nurturing, opportunity, and understanding that people who act outside society's acceptable boundaries will be drawn back within them. They fail to recognize that you're not returning these people to something they deviated from, you have to create an entirely new worldview for them that they never had any experience with.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    On the other hand, if you make reintegration to society impossible, and eventually release prisoners... you know the outcome you're going to get. Plenty of societies appear to do much better than the US at preventing recidivism and reforming criminals to productive members of society.
    - ddxxdd 7y ago
      I remember a common saying that's bandied about Hacker News: a 10x quantitative difference is a qualitative difference. Well, America's violent crime rate is 10 times higher than Europe's violent crime rate, so make of that what you will.
domnomnom 7y ago
Yeah, well you're also not the one keeping people locked up in cages. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ALittleLight 7y ago
You could imagine circumstances where the officers outlook was justified or not justified. I think judging them based on only this off hand remark about someone's perception of them is not merited. For example, suppose you knew that one inmate had repeatedly beaten his wife and child. While in prison he abused and threatened inmates and guards. You suspected he perpetrated the violent rape of multiple other inmates but can't prove it because the victims refuse to testify. You think he's in the class because he's bored. In this hypothetical, would it be wrong for some correctional officers to believe the notional inmate didn't deserve the chance?
- posterboy 7y ago
  The point is, the officers did not deserve to make such claims. Not under the veil of ambiguity, nor pessimism. Your strawman is a fallacy. Suppose an inmate had committed a logical fallacy. Should they thence be barred from reason (reasoning?)? English isn't my first language, sorry. PS: You might say the hypothetically notional inmate deserved the offer, but wasn't eligable to go, though one had to wonder why. You might also say it was morally imperative for the officer to bring up charges, if they were sufficiently convinced, to instate conditions that would isolate the culprit from maths education, social interactions in general, and probably any hope of correction.
  - ALittleLight 7y ago
    I don't understand your comment. My point is, because you don't know the officers, inmates, or the broader situation, you shouldn't comment as to whether the officers are right or wrong - because you don't know. There are possible worlds where the officers are justified or misunderstood and there are possible worlds where the officers hold incorrect beliefs. What evidence lets you know which possible world is more likely? Being prejudiced against the officers strikes me as similar to the imagined (and possibly real) situation where the officers are prejudiced against the inmates. We, as readers, just don't know.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      Your comment pretty much ignores the context of the statement about the correctional officers. You are basically saying "we can't tell a thing about the officers, but we know the author is a jerk for castigating them". Never mind that the author has all the things you want, the broader knowledge of the situation and so on.
posterboy 7y ago
read "deserve" in any sense that is active in more than the grammatic sense. Maybe they thought the inmates didn't want to, or weren't able to learn. More likely, we think the wardens thought the inmates were criminals. I'm not sure I deserve to know the difference.

DMac87 7y ago

For those in the SF Bay Area, you can have significant impact by sharing your time: https://prisonuniversityproject.org/get-involved/volunteer/ https://prisonuniversityproject.org/get-involved/volunteer/ http://asi.sfsu.edu/asprograms/project-rebound/ http://asi.sfsu.edu/asprograms/project-rebound/

gowld 7y ago

Note: The article is about the high-school math ("College Algebra" and "Finite Math", material covered in "Algebra II" and "Precalculus" in high school) that is taught in remedial classes in community colleges. From my perspective as a tutor of several students (one who was a libarian, another in nursing school), it's a very popular but strage class to offer, as it's of no use to the nearly students who take it after high school -- it's too abstract for those students, which is why they didn't learn it the first time they saw it in high school, and aren't going to use it in their careers as nurses or office workers or other community-college careers. "Business mathematics" and "personal finance" would probably be more helpful to these students. Of course, it's not the OP's fault that community colleges demand these weeder courses.

posterboy 7y ago
It's probably the thinking in your antepenultimate paragraph reinforcing itself. Instead, abstract skills can offer a gateway to the application of more rigid rules, so to speak, because it shows that they are strong, but the applicability is flexible.
- orhmeh09 7y ago
  > antepenultimate paragraph “Second paragraph” is a simpler way to put it.
  - seisvelas 7y ago
    "Second to last"
    - lewilewilewi 7y ago
      "Third to last"
      - throwno 7y ago
        His third to last paragraph is the second paragraph which is why it's stupid to use some wordy bullshit like "antepenultimate". You NEED to get Grammarly as the incessant ads say. To downvoters: Toxic pedantry like this is what drives women and minorities out of STEM. You're the reason we can't have diversity.

gigama 7y ago

"My students had such a fierce passion and thirst for learning the material. The continuous stream of questions during classes was a testament to their refusal to be satisfied by mere knowledge and to their incomparable commitment to achieve true understanding." Should be everyone's default position. "If you treat inmates like students, they will become students — and often they will surprise you and even become scholars. They will become inspiring agents of change whom we want to see out in our society." An A+ for Annie Raymond.

globuous 7y ago
Bernard Stiegler's story has always fascinated me [1]: "In 1987–88, with Catherine Counot, Stiegler commissioned an exhibition at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, entitled Mémoires du futur: bibliothèques et technologies. Stiegler defended his thesis at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1992. He has been a Director at the Collège international de philosophie, and a Professor at the Université de Technologie at Compiègne, as well as a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has held the positions of Director General at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), and Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM)." So in short, he has a PhD, became a professor, and ended being the director of a french research institute ("IRCAM is part of a consortium with Stanford's Center for Computer Research and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) in Berkeley, California." [2]) Before all of that: "Between 1978 and 1983 Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery, first at the Prison Saint-Michel in Toulouse, and then at the Centre de détention in Muret. It was during this period that he became interested in philosophy, studying it by correspondence with Gérard Granel at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail. His transformation in prison is recounted in his book, Passer à l'acte (2003; the English translation of this work is included in the 2009 volume, Acting Out)." [1] I find this so inspiring. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRCAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRCAM
- tcbawo 7y ago
  Much (but not all) can be said for influence of one's environment and surroundings. Unfortunately, for most addicts and felons, there aren't enough resources in the world to give them all the opportunity for a fresh start. I'm all for second chances, but I would prefer spending time and money where it would be most effective, like early intervention and child care.

xvilka 7y ago

Would make sense to teach also the probability theory and, maybe, Python coding basics. To give them tools they can use after or even in the prison itself (in some cases).