3 ms·
I imagine that it will turn out to be a mixture of a few valuable insights, and a lot of politically motivated bullshit. The insights will be used as an excuse
by Viliam1234 6y ago
I imagine that it will turn out to be a mixture of a few valuable insights, and a lot of politically motivated bullshit. The insights will be used as an excuse to push the politics.
It would be nice if someone could extract the good insights and publish them separately, maybe just on one page of paper. For example, here are some ideas that come to my mind:
* For minority students, make sure that the language itself is not a major obstacle. Maybe in a perfect world everyone would get a teacher who speaks their preferred language. But a simple useful thing you can do here and now is to print a dictionary of words you are going to use in the following lecture. Like "triangle = el triángulo", except this is of course a stupid example, but there are probably also good ones. So the student doesn't get stuck merely because you used a word they didn't understand. Depending on how much work you want to spend here, you could even provide a short summary of the lecture. (Review it with someone who speaks the language and understands your subject, don't just use whatever Google Translate throws at you. If you don't know such person, you could probably find someone on Facebook.)
* Do not assume everyone has an access to internet. If it is important, print it on paper and give the paper to kids.
* Check whether your examples are not culturally foreign to the students. Again, a silly made-up example, but don't use "two apples and two apples equals four apples" as an example for kids from a culture that doesn't know apples (or even might have a taboo against apples); just use oranges or whatever. Or just make sure you use a wide enough range of examples.
* Try to get some insight into what their culture expects from your students. Maybe asking questions is considered impolite, or trying to answer a question unless you are 100% sure, or admitting that you know something that your classmates don't know, or admitting that you don't understand something. Try to find a workaround; discuss your solution with people from given culture.
On the other hand... I have downloaded some documents from that website and the language they use is horrible. Bad faith assumed everywhere, there is no such thing as an innocent mistake or ignorance, everything is "racism" and "supremacism". Come on; if you are trying to tell people they should be more empathetic and helpful to each other, the least you can do is stop being an aggressive asshole towards them. Calling someone a racist twenty times in a day, just because they e.g. teach math using the traditional methods, that definitely is not a way to make friends with anyone who has a shred of self-respect. (Yeah, it's not about making friends, it's about signaling being "holier than thou".)
- temp8964 6y agoYou are 100% correct. It is critical race theory (CRT) decorated with a few pedagogical insights. Those pedagogical insights have been well known. They can stand alone and do not need those CRT BS at all. Also, they are never a major issues in math education.
- lazyasciiart 6y agoNever? Really? That's a strong claim.