3 ms·

This content looks like it is meant to help people learn how to teach math to blacks and latinos effectively, not an alternative math.

throwaway210222 5y ago
… and Multilinguals as well. So Canadians will no doubt benefit from this too? At some point - once an adult - you have to call bollocks when you see it. Signed, A person who can speak five languages.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  I just took a skim through the material. The only objectionable thing was couching it in heavily racial or equitable terms, but the bulk of the work is really just trying to look for opportunities to improve pedagogy. The content itself is pretty vanilla and is discussing methods of pedagogy that are pretty old (at first glance it does not seem meaningfully different from the Montessori method and other approaches like “couching math in everyday examples” is an old idea).
  - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
    The difference is in the results. At the end of the day, children taught by the Montessori method were proficient in reading, writing and math. Today proficiency levels are plunging at the same time that the focus on "education" is being shifted heavily towards "diversity and equity".
spangry 5y ago
https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... "This tool provides teachers an opportunity to examine their actions, beliefs, and values around teaching mathematics. The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by making visible the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture (Jones and Okun 2001; dismantling Racism 2016) with respect to math. Building on the framework, teachers engage with critical praxis in order to shift their instructional beliefs and practices towards antiracist math education. By centering antiracism, we model how to be antiracist math educators with accountability."
- 4512124672456 5y ago
  That still has nothing to do with alternative math, but teaching.
  - Viliam1234 5y ago
    It has nothing to do with math, full stop. Yet, math teachers are required to waste their time learning it.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - fn-mote 5y ago
      One could consider it a waste of time if it were demonstrated not to be effective improving the outcomes of learing math. Math teachers need to know (1) math; and (2) how to teach it. The argumet is that this falls into the second category. I am not claiming to have read any evidence that it is effective, or even that there is any. I do think this shallow dismissal is improper.
      - Viliam1234 5y ago
        So the burden of proof is on those who doubt that indoctrinating math teachers with critical race theory improves the teaching of math? That sounds a bit unfair, especially considering that anyone who would seriously try to provide such evidence would probably commit a career suicide, by being called a racist and cancelled.
kaitai 5y ago
I've seen a number of attacks on sites like Equitable Math. The criticisms I've seen seem to fall into several categories (this may not be exhaustive): * "Math should always have one answer and this idea that there could be different ways of doing things is evil and will corrupt our youth. Objective = one answer." Ugh. As a mathematician this is the one I hate the most. This is what led Pythagoreans to campaign against irrational numbers, some Catholics to campaign against imaginary numbers, some folks to react against distributions/generalized derivatives/generalized functions in analysis. The whole point of math, the whole creativity and beauty and opportunity for innovation, is to see how you can break the rules!! Hyperbolic and spherical geometry are not tools of the DeViL!!! Nor are they woke. David Brooks, get a frikkin education [1]. * "You shouldn't talk about race in math because math is objective." Math is a human activity, humans are embedded in society. Brown vs Board was decided within my parents' lifetime. Racial segregation was the official policy of many educational institutions for most of US history and students will come with different educational histories. When you're teaching, you want to connect with students and you want to trace the intellectual history of the topic. It is more intellectually honest to acknowledge the unfairness of history than pretend it doesn't exist, and for students to understand the intertwined evolution of mathematics and technology they must understand historical context as well. When you're trying to motivate kids, especially, role models and stories from history and today can be useful, which is why ET Bell published Men of Mathematics [2] which inspired folks like Freeman Dyson, and we today include Power in Numbers by Talithia Williams, Mathematically Gifted and Black at https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/ https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/, Lathisms at https://www.lathisms.org/ https://www.lathisms.org/, Mathematicians of the African Diaspora at https://www.mathad.com/home https://www.mathad.com/home, and more. There's not much point in dwelling on race/gender/sexuality, but intentional censorship (pretending Alan Turing wasn't gay, pretending Elbert Frank Cox had equal employment opportunities) is deeply dishonest. * "Math should not be a tool for social justice." Um, what should it be? As I wrote in my other comment on this thread, everything is a tool. Math is a tool for justice, for oppression, for carpentry, for art, for software design, for computer games, for gerrymandering and anti-gerrymandering. As a mathematician I just want everyone to have access to this tool, rather than only some people! The idea that education can help people and society better them/itselves is not new. Check out the work of Bob Moses during the Civil Rights Movement [3]. It's a good read as everyone in America agrees the Civil Rights Movement was Good but many of those people believe "wokeness" is Bad -- because the concept of wokeness is also a tool used for many purposes. The argument is just over how people get to use this tool and who gets to use it. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opinion/this-is-how-wokeness-ends.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opinion/this-is-how-woken... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Mathematics [3] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/206027/radical-equations-by-robert-p-moses/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/206027/radical-equa...

throwaway210222 5y ago

… and Multilinguals as well. So Canadians will no doubt benefit from this too? At some point - once an adult - you have to call bollocks when you see it. Signed, A person who can speak five languages.

vlovich123 5y ago
I just took a skim through the material. The only objectionable thing was couching it in heavily racial or equitable terms, but the bulk of the work is really just trying to look for opportunities to improve pedagogy. The content itself is pretty vanilla and is discussing methods of pedagogy that are pretty old (at first glance it does not seem meaningfully different from the Montessori method and other approaches like “couching math in everyday examples” is an old idea).
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  The difference is in the results. At the end of the day, children taught by the Montessori method were proficient in reading, writing and math. Today proficiency levels are plunging at the same time that the focus on "education" is being shifted heavily towards "diversity and equity".

spangry 5y ago

https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... "This tool provides teachers an opportunity to examine their actions, beliefs, and values around teaching mathematics. The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by making visible the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture (Jones and Okun 2001; dismantling Racism 2016) with respect to math. Building on the framework, teachers engage with critical praxis in order to shift their instructional beliefs and practices towards antiracist math education. By centering antiracism, we model how to be antiracist math educators with accountability."

4512124672456 5y ago
That still has nothing to do with alternative math, but teaching.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  It has nothing to do with math, full stop. Yet, math teachers are required to waste their time learning it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - fn-mote 5y ago
    One could consider it a waste of time if it were demonstrated not to be effective improving the outcomes of learing math. Math teachers need to know (1) math; and (2) how to teach it. The argumet is that this falls into the second category. I am not claiming to have read any evidence that it is effective, or even that there is any. I do think this shallow dismissal is improper.
    - Viliam1234 5y ago
      So the burden of proof is on those who doubt that indoctrinating math teachers with critical race theory improves the teaching of math? That sounds a bit unfair, especially considering that anyone who would seriously try to provide such evidence would probably commit a career suicide, by being called a racist and cancelled.

kaitai 5y ago

I've seen a number of attacks on sites like Equitable Math. The criticisms I've seen seem to fall into several categories (this may not be exhaustive): * "Math should always have one answer and this idea that there could be different ways of doing things is evil and will corrupt our youth. Objective = one answer." Ugh. As a mathematician this is the one I hate the most. This is what led Pythagoreans to campaign against irrational numbers, some Catholics to campaign against imaginary numbers, some folks to react against distributions/generalized derivatives/generalized functions in analysis. The whole point of math, the whole creativity and beauty and opportunity for innovation, is to see how you can break the rules!! Hyperbolic and spherical geometry are not tools of the DeViL!!! Nor are they woke. David Brooks, get a frikkin education [1]. * "You shouldn't talk about race in math because math is objective." Math is a human activity, humans are embedded in society. Brown vs Board was decided within my parents' lifetime. Racial segregation was the official policy of many educational institutions for most of US history and students will come with different educational histories. When you're teaching, you want to connect with students and you want to trace the intellectual history of the topic. It is more intellectually honest to acknowledge the unfairness of history than pretend it doesn't exist, and for students to understand the intertwined evolution of mathematics and technology they must understand historical context as well. When you're trying to motivate kids, especially, role models and stories from history and today can be useful, which is why ET Bell published Men of Mathematics [2] which inspired folks like Freeman Dyson, and we today include Power in Numbers by Talithia Williams, Mathematically Gifted and Black at https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/ https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/, Lathisms at https://www.lathisms.org/ https://www.lathisms.org/, Mathematicians of the African Diaspora at https://www.mathad.com/home https://www.mathad.com/home, and more. There's not much point in dwelling on race/gender/sexuality, but intentional censorship (pretending Alan Turing wasn't gay, pretending Elbert Frank Cox had equal employment opportunities) is deeply dishonest. * "Math should not be a tool for social justice." Um, what should it be? As I wrote in my other comment on this thread, everything is a tool. Math is a tool for justice, for oppression, for carpentry, for art, for software design, for computer games, for gerrymandering and anti-gerrymandering. As a mathematician I just want everyone to have access to this tool, rather than only some people! The idea that education can help people and society better them/itselves is not new. Check out the work of Bob Moses during the Civil Rights Movement [3]. It's a good read as everyone in America agrees the Civil Rights Movement was Good but many of those people believe "wokeness" is Bad -- because the concept of wokeness is also a tool used for many purposes. The argument is just over how people get to use this tool and who gets to use it. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opinion/this-is-how-wokeness-ends.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opinion/this-is-how-woken... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Mathematics [3] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/206027/radical-equations-by-robert-p-moses/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/206027/radical-equa...