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What would "social justice math" look like? Serious question, I can't even imagine. Here in Europe math education hasn't changed a ton in the past decades at al

by atoav 4y ago

What would "social justice math" look like? Serious question, I can't even imagine. Here in Europe math education hasn't changed a ton in the past decades at all.

rayiner 4y ago
It’s an effort by teachers unions to use their presence in schools to socialize minority children into viewing themselves as victims of pervasive racism and to cultivate activist leanings that will lead them to vote democrat (the party tightly aligned with teachers unions): https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-through-a-social-justice-lens/2020/12 https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-throu...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Tomte 4y ago
The rallying cry seems to be that "2+2=4 is racist". Expanded a bit, it seems to be that insisting that some answers are "wrong" disregards students' differing backgrounds and diverse avenues to solve problems.
- yonaguska 4y ago
  Some of it was also that she shouldn't expect students to do homework, or she was expected to try and use word problems with narratives.
  - ekimekim 4y ago
    Those...sound like reasonable things? Many students aren't going to learn by rote memorization of completing homework. It it helpful to support different learning styles. A big problem with math education is that it's too abstract. It's hard to relate mathematical concepts to real life. "When are we going to use this?", people ask. Phrasing your questions in terms of real problems with a narrative can help students learn.
    - Tomte 4y ago
      Homework usually isn't rote learning (unless we're talking foreign language vocabulary – and there rote learning is important!), but practice. Students get to practice what the teacher (tried to) showed them with different problems, so both they and the teacher can see if they mastered the topic.
      - astrange 4y ago
        IIRC most of the evidence shows homework isn’t very useful for learning. (And, unfortunately, that almost no skills generally transfer over to other skills, ie that practicing math doesn’t improve anything other than that specific math.)
        Ekaros 4y ago
        What about algebra? Which I consider the field of math that actually carries over to many many other things. Like physics and chemistry. And certain skill level in it is required to be able manipulate expressions in other fields.
- status_quo69 4y ago
  > The rallying cry seems to be that "2+2=4 is racist". Source? This is such a wild claim it has to be made up. A cursory google search brings this article: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-through-a-social-justice-lens/2020/12 https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-throu... Which is distilled down to "teachers teach math in a way that is topical to the current environment, such as BLM protests which is really nothing new. You might disagree with it, sure, but to say that this is "the wokes" teaching 2+2=fish, that's frankly ridiculous. In fact, the only thing I can find reporting on "2+2=racist" is this Washington Examiner article deriding a math teacher from NYC for her tweets (article here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/math-professor-claims-equation-2-2-4-reeks-of-white-supremacist-patriarchy https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/math-professor-claim...) which sounds _awful_ but it's a single person tweeting, and it seems to be in relation to using "math is pure and objective so it always must be neutral" as a defense for situations where data/statistics/algorithms presented show a clear bias. Which I think generally is an agreed upon phenomenon-- depending on the sampling and interpretation of the data, folks can come to _wildly_ different conclusions, especially if data was accidentally omitted. Best example of this phenomenon is facial recognition software, which can perform very badly when deviating from the sample data. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-evaluates-effects-race-age-sex-face-recognition-software https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-eva... > For one-to-one matching, the team saw higher rates of false positives for Asian and African American faces relative to images of Caucasians. The differentials often ranged from a factor of 10 to 100 times, depending on the individual algorithm. False positives might present a security concern to the system owner, as they may allow access to impostors. ... > However, a notable exception was for some algorithms developed in Asian countries. There was no such dramatic difference in false positives in one-to-one matching between Asian and Caucasian faces for algorithms developed in Asia. While Grother reiterated that the NIST study does not explore the relationship between cause and effect, one possible connection, and area for research, is the relationship between an algorithm’s performance and the data used to train it. “These results are an encouraging sign that more diverse training data may produce more equitable outcomes, should it be possible for developers to use such data,” he said. All the other sources I found on google were either think tanks, facebook posts, or spam sites. ETA: even in the most pessimistic reading of those tweets, I'm personally hard pressed to find that one person tweeting means that all math teachers everywhere are trying to take math down to "2+2=racist"
ndriscoll 4y ago
Presumably things like California's proposed new math standards documents[1]. In chapter 7 (for 11-13 year olds) there are examples like this: > BLUE Family: 2 adults; 2 children You are a Latinx family with two children under the age of five. Mom stays home to take care of the children. Dad works 40 hours per week at a construction company that pays two times minimum wage for nontipped employees. > YELLOW Family: 1 adult You are a young, single Black woman who is going to school part time and working full time (40 hours per week). You work at the same construction company as the dad of the BLUE family, but most Black women (including you) make 64 percent of what men at the company make. i.e. the government encouraging flamebaiting over race/sex. The example goes on to have children conclude the minimum wage is unfair and encourage them to write letters to their representatives about raising it based a comparison of wages to cost of rentals in Chicago. Mind you, when this proposal was making the rounds a couple years ago, I looked up rentals in Chicago and found plenty at a fraction of the quoted numbers for the exercise, but the point of the exercise is to teach children the virtues of activism, not to teach them to use math to understand their world. [1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/

by atoav 4y ago

What would "social justice math" look like? Serious question, I can't even imagine. Here in Europe math education hasn't changed a ton in the past decades at all.

rayiner 4y ago

It’s an effort by teachers unions to use their presence in schools to socialize minority children into viewing themselves as victims of pervasive racism and to cultivate activist leanings that will lead them to vote democrat (the party tightly aligned with teachers unions): https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-through-a-social-justice-lens/2020/12 https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-throu...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Tomte 4y ago

The rallying cry seems to be that "2+2=4 is racist". Expanded a bit, it seems to be that insisting that some answers are "wrong" disregards students' differing backgrounds and diverse avenues to solve problems.

yonaguska 4y ago
Some of it was also that she shouldn't expect students to do homework, or she was expected to try and use word problems with narratives.
- ekimekim 4y ago
  Those...sound like reasonable things? Many students aren't going to learn by rote memorization of completing homework. It it helpful to support different learning styles. A big problem with math education is that it's too abstract. It's hard to relate mathematical concepts to real life. "When are we going to use this?", people ask. Phrasing your questions in terms of real problems with a narrative can help students learn.
  - Tomte 4y ago
    Homework usually isn't rote learning (unless we're talking foreign language vocabulary – and there rote learning is important!), but practice. Students get to practice what the teacher (tried to) showed them with different problems, so both they and the teacher can see if they mastered the topic.
    - astrange 4y ago
      IIRC most of the evidence shows homework isn’t very useful for learning. (And, unfortunately, that almost no skills generally transfer over to other skills, ie that practicing math doesn’t improve anything other than that specific math.)
      - Ekaros 4y ago
        What about algebra? Which I consider the field of math that actually carries over to many many other things. Like physics and chemistry. And certain skill level in it is required to be able manipulate expressions in other fields.
status_quo69 4y ago
> The rallying cry seems to be that "2+2=4 is racist". Source? This is such a wild claim it has to be made up. A cursory google search brings this article: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-through-a-social-justice-lens/2020/12 https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-throu... Which is distilled down to "teachers teach math in a way that is topical to the current environment, such as BLM protests which is really nothing new. You might disagree with it, sure, but to say that this is "the wokes" teaching 2+2=fish, that's frankly ridiculous. In fact, the only thing I can find reporting on "2+2=racist" is this Washington Examiner article deriding a math teacher from NYC for her tweets (article here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/math-professor-claims-equation-2-2-4-reeks-of-white-supremacist-patriarchy https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/math-professor-claim...) which sounds _awful_ but it's a single person tweeting, and it seems to be in relation to using "math is pure and objective so it always must be neutral" as a defense for situations where data/statistics/algorithms presented show a clear bias. Which I think generally is an agreed upon phenomenon-- depending on the sampling and interpretation of the data, folks can come to _wildly_ different conclusions, especially if data was accidentally omitted. Best example of this phenomenon is facial recognition software, which can perform very badly when deviating from the sample data. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-evaluates-effects-race-age-sex-face-recognition-software https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-eva... > For one-to-one matching, the team saw higher rates of false positives for Asian and African American faces relative to images of Caucasians. The differentials often ranged from a factor of 10 to 100 times, depending on the individual algorithm. False positives might present a security concern to the system owner, as they may allow access to impostors. ... > However, a notable exception was for some algorithms developed in Asian countries. There was no such dramatic difference in false positives in one-to-one matching between Asian and Caucasian faces for algorithms developed in Asia. While Grother reiterated that the NIST study does not explore the relationship between cause and effect, one possible connection, and area for research, is the relationship between an algorithm’s performance and the data used to train it. “These results are an encouraging sign that more diverse training data may produce more equitable outcomes, should it be possible for developers to use such data,” he said. All the other sources I found on google were either think tanks, facebook posts, or spam sites. ETA: even in the most pessimistic reading of those tweets, I'm personally hard pressed to find that one person tweeting means that all math teachers everywhere are trying to take math down to "2+2=racist"

ndriscoll 4y ago

Presumably things like California's proposed new math standards documents[1]. In chapter 7 (for 11-13 year olds) there are examples like this: > BLUE Family: 2 adults; 2 children You are a Latinx family with two children under the age of five. Mom stays home to take care of the children. Dad works 40 hours per week at a construction company that pays two times minimum wage for nontipped employees. > YELLOW Family: 1 adult You are a young, single Black woman who is going to school part time and working full time (40 hours per week). You work at the same construction company as the dad of the BLUE family, but most Black women (including you) make 64 percent of what men at the company make. i.e. the government encouraging flamebaiting over race/sex. The example goes on to have children conclude the minimum wage is unfair and encourage them to write letters to their representatives about raising it based a comparison of wages to cost of rentals in Chicago. Mind you, when this proposal was making the rounds a couple years ago, I looked up rentals in Chicago and found plenty at a fraction of the quoted numbers for the exercise, but the point of the exercise is to teach children the virtues of activism, not to teach them to use math to understand their world. [1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/