[conspire] Is math instruction racist?

Sun Jul 11 12:58:03 PDT 2021

First, I know a fair amount about the current sad state of pedagogy in the US because of grad school, as most of the people I went to grad school with (for both degrees) were teachers going so they’d get more coin. Thus, many of the lunch conversations were about the current state of things.

These days, there’s an unfortunate focus on “teaching to the test,” meaning focusing on the correct answer rather than the concepts behind the answer.

This post calls that “item teaching” as opposed to “curriculum teaching.” http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar01/vol58/num06/Teaching-to-the-Test¢.aspx <http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar01/vol58/num06/Teaching-to-the-Test%C2%A2.aspx>

That’s what the paper Paul linked is referring to, but with a framing that’s uncomfortable to hear.

Second, because most math problems (in K-12) *have* a right answer, we tend to focus on “right” vs. “wrong” without realizing that there’s mastery involved to get to the point where you are right. And THAT is not what’s taught. If you were learning to hand-cut dovetail joints, you might have a first effort that looked like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/abyrja/my_first_attempt_at_handcut_dovetails_the_horror/ <https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/abyrja/my_first_attempt_at_handcut_dovetails_the_horror/>

There’s a recognition in that trade that it’s going to take you multiple attempts to get there, but basically anyone *can* cut good dovetails, it just takes practice.

Someone else’s first effort might look like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/ohnzzk/first_dovetail_made_a_bunch_of_mistakes_and/ <https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/ohnzzk/first_dovetail_made_a_bunch_of_mistakes_and/>

In current math pedagogy, they’d be tracked into genius classes without regard to the thought *that they both may wind up with the same level of skill*.

Instead, students are often tracked into slow learning classes because of a failure of pedagogy, not their future mathematical potential, but then their future mathematical potential is nerfed because they’re now put in a class where the district just has to do their best, and that already wasn’t good enough. :P

Unfortunately, lifelong earning potential in the US correlates highly with math ability (if you exclude outliers such as sports and entertainment, but even those have their math). You probably can’t get into med school without p-chem. You can’t get into law school without significant math. CompSci typically requires 1-2 years of calculus even if you never use it. We use math skills as gatekeeping.

Also, it’s far more likely that women and people of color are tracked into those lesser classes (as, yes, I have been, though I’ve also been tracked into genius classes too). Despite that, I managed to wind up getting code in space before I was 18.

It was this experiment: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JA083iA12p05685 <https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JA083iA12p05685>

So next, another of the issues is that math is taught so that you have to solve the problem in *one specific way*. That’s not math, that’s pedagogy.

Like this example in Vedic math of how to multiply 32 x 11 from this video at 0:50:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grkWGeqW99c <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grkWGeqW99c>

(BTW, there are a *bunch* of other math shortcut tips and tricks from a variety of cultures on YouTube, and I find them fascinating.)

If you used that technique to get an answer in a US (public K-12) classroom, you’d be marked down even though it is absolutely a valid way to solve that problem.

Different cultures have different approaches to teaching math, so a student from India who’d learned Vedic math would suddenly be getting the right answer the wrong way if they moved to the US. This is where you get into the “our approach to teaching math is racist” issue. In other subjects, we do take other cultures’ learning concepts into account where possible. But not math, reportedly.

Third, I want to talk for a minute about the concept of teaching people about people who look like them. The only women in math or science I was taught about were the Curies. Granted, things are better now, but it absolutely meant something to me that there were people like Grace Hopper in my field. (For those who don’t know, the annual conference for women in computing is Grace Hopper, started by Anita Borg.)

For example, a friend of ours, his mother is Rosalyn Yalow, who won a Nobel Prize in Medicine. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1977/yalow/biographical/ <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1977/yalow/biographical/>
Her work was fundamental to developing things like blood sugar testing. The only reason I happen to know about her is because I know her son. (Also, we largely only teach about Nobel winners, but, as an example, cryptography’s an amazing field that underlies everything we do in daily digital life, but there’s never been a Nobel awarded for cryptography.)

I think we *should* teach about women and minorities (and queer people, etc.) in math-related fields, which we still largely don’t.

As an example of the struggles some faced, let’s look at Alicia Boole Stott, daughter of George (Mr. Boolean) Boole.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0315086007000973 <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0315086007000973>

"As a woman born in the middle of the 19th century, Alicia had little educational opportunity. In England, colleges did not offer degrees to women and the study of science or mathematics was not encouraged. Alicia was only four years old when her father died so she had little opportunity to be influenced by him, and as a child, her acquaintance with formal mathematics consisted only of the first two books of Euclid.”

Yet she did amazing work in four-dimensional geometry, and she might have been better recognized for it were she not a woman.

Deirdre

> On Jul 11, 2021, at 07:51, paulz at ieee.org wrote:
> 
> There is a group that wants to change math instruction in CA.  They say that it is a white supremist attitude to focus on getting the right answer:
> 
> https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf <https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf>
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