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Culture and identity have always been present in math. Starting words problems with "Bob makes $50,000 a year" or "Alice needs 10 onions from the store" helps f

Culture and identity have always been present in math. Starting words problems with "Bob makes $50,000 a year" or "Alice needs 10 onions from the store" helps frame men as workers and women as home-makers. Taken by themselves they're fairly innocuous. Combined with every other social signal children hear every day, they can perpetuate out of date and harmful stereotypes.

Out_of_Characte 5y ago
My experience with those story driven math problems is that dyslexic people fail them despite doing well on pure math.
- freemint 5y ago
  Yet being able to map real world problems into math problems and solve them is an essential skill. In my class in Europe story driven problems were read aloud.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
"Starting words problems with "Bob makes $50,000 a year" or "Alice needs 10 onions from the store" helps frame men as workers and women as home-makers." This is one of those statements where part of your brain goes "well, I guess there might be atom-sized kernel of truth to this". But in reality, I doubt anyone is tangibly affected by the congruent use of Male/Female names in word problems that map to traditional Male/Female gender roles. I believe this is a result of a hypersensitive social-justice filter which results in an astonishingly large false-positive rate. Quite frankly, I just fail to see how gendered language in word problems not only 1) reflects math being inherently cultured and identity-based, 2) harmfully reinforces malicious stereotypes (people can just as easily write Alice makes $50,000 a year, Bob needs 10 onions from the store), and 3) are odious enough to justify a substantial, near fundamental, change in math education.
danachow 5y ago
Lord jesus what a strawman. You have any good evidence that math word problems in elementary ed are systematically biased in this way - and the plural of anecdote is not data, so don't waste our time.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  They were working overtime not to allow any of this into the curriculum even when I was in elementary school back in the 80's. Usually it was worthy of an eyeroll from all of us: "John and his friends Jamal, Carlos and Akira are on the bus..."
syspec 5y ago
So randomize the names, problem solved without getting rid of word problems. Word problems are pain in the butt, but they teach the skill of converting an abstract problem math symbols which can be solved
jimbokun 5y ago
So write a script to randomize the names in the textbook and be done with it.

Out_of_Characte 5y ago

My experience with those story driven math problems is that dyslexic people fail them despite doing well on pure math.

freemint 5y ago
Yet being able to map real world problems into math problems and solve them is an essential skill. In my class in Europe story driven problems were read aloud.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

"Starting words problems with "Bob makes $50,000 a year" or "Alice needs 10 onions from the store" helps frame men as workers and women as home-makers." This is one of those statements where part of your brain goes "well, I guess there might be atom-sized kernel of truth to this". But in reality, I doubt anyone is tangibly affected by the congruent use of Male/Female names in word problems that map to traditional Male/Female gender roles. I believe this is a result of a hypersensitive social-justice filter which results in an astonishingly large false-positive rate. Quite frankly, I just fail to see how gendered language in word problems not only 1) reflects math being inherently cultured and identity-based, 2) harmfully reinforces malicious stereotypes (people can just as easily write Alice makes $50,000 a year, Bob needs 10 onions from the store), and 3) are odious enough to justify a substantial, near fundamental, change in math education.

danachow 5y ago

Lord jesus what a strawman. You have any good evidence that math word problems in elementary ed are systematically biased in this way - and the plural of anecdote is not data, so don't waste our time.

commandlinefan 5y ago
They were working overtime not to allow any of this into the curriculum even when I was in elementary school back in the 80's. Usually it was worthy of an eyeroll from all of us: "John and his friends Jamal, Carlos and Akira are on the bus..."

syspec 5y ago

So randomize the names, problem solved without getting rid of word problems. Word problems are pain in the butt, but they teach the skill of converting an abstract problem math symbols which can be solved

jimbokun 5y ago

So write a script to randomize the names in the textbook and be done with it.