I have to say I'm disappointed in this professor's misrepresentation of the Bill and Melinda Gates paper. After reading his rant about communism, I expected to

I have to say I'm disappointed in this professor's misrepresentation of the Bill and Melinda Gates paper. After reading his rant about communism, I expected to go into it shaking my head at whatever nonsense white woke people are up to nowadays. What I found was a PDF that sought to aid teachers in their teaching of mathematics and encourage their students to think of math not as a boring sequence of steps but as the nuanced field it actually is. According to the article: The program argues that “white supremacy culture shows up in the classroom when the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer” or when students are required to show their work, while stipulating that the very “concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false”. The main goal of the program is “to dismantle racism in mathematics instruction” with the expressly political aim of engaging “the sociopolitical turn in all aspects of education, including mathematics.” But the actual PDF says this. On getting the right answer: The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict. Verbal Example: Come up with at least two answers that might solve this problem. • Classroom Activity: Challenge standardized test questions by getting the “right” answer, but justify other answers by unpacking the assumptions that are made in the problem. • Classroom Activity: Deconstructed Multiple Choice - given a set of multiple choice answers, students discuss why these answers may have been included (can also be used to highlight common mistakes). • Professional Development: Study the purpose of math education, and re-envision it. Schooling as we know it began during the industrial revolution, when precision and accuracy were highly valued. What are the myriad ways we can conceptualize mathematics in today’s world and beyond? On showing your work (page 54): Math teachers ask students to show work so that teachers know what students are thinking, but that can center the teacher’s need to understand rather than student learning. Teachers should seek to understand individual student perspectives and focus on students showing their work in ways that help students learn how to process information. • Verbal Example: If you were working with a fellow mathematician who was absent this day, what might you tell them to help them learn it? • Classroom Activity: Number talks, where students have to engage with mental mathematics not limited to computations. • Professional Development: As a department, solve complex problems without writing and share with each other about that process. I look at the proposed activities and I wish my teachers had the training to implement them. As one of the poor people who made it out thanks to math, I had to watch my classmates, many of them white, fall behind and grow disinterested because math was long work books and time trials (The class would regularly race to finish a hundred inane math problems. I and another student, latino, were the only ones to bother. He stopped competing when I kept winning. This whole process was very stupid.) The PDF does not at all encourage making math easier. It would make math harder. It suggests teaching Linear Algebra (something I didn't learn until after undergrad) before precalculus and teaching about unsolvable problems (it boggles my mind how no one taught me about P vs NP problems) early. Teamwork is something I think is lacking from mathematics in general. White supremacy hurts everyone, not just the black and white kids left behind by it. It also seems to poison the minds of great people, like this professor, into thinking uncritically about ways to improve the capabilities of others. A teacher's job isn't to find good students but to make them. I hope the author takes another look.