Inclusive high school math?

[marshwiggle]

I don't understand why it's relevant whether or not a government agency approved these terrible decisions.  I'm not claiming they're part of a curriculum or anything. Secundem_artem gave an ironic example of racist math. We believed it, and were mocked. I gave these examples as a way of showing that it wasn't unreasonable for us to believe that these examples might be real.

The disagreements here, and in society in general, are not primarily between progressives and white supremacists (who are a tiny, if vocal, minority.) They're between the progressives and the large part of the population who don't think introducing identity politics into everything helps.

The pedagogical techniques that are most effective in math are probably the same in Sweden, Singapore, and Sudan. Do kids in India need to study the history of the caste system in math class in order to learn math? Math is a skill, and the most important thing is practice. More practice is the way to better skills, and the more time devoted to practice the better. Any time spent on social philosophy detracts from that. If you want to remind teachers to use "Jamal" instead of "Jim" in your word problems, fine, but that doesn't require a whole "decolonized" curriculum (whatever that would be).

And with those examples like the gang-related math questions? My guess is that they've been used by math teachers trying to get their disengaged students interested, and a teacher with a good rappoort with students may even have gotten laughs from some of those very students because of it. Humour is context-sensitive; what may be funny in one context may not in another, and whether something was offensive to the students in the room can't be determined without talking to them.

You left out Japan and the Netherlands.

The reference I made above to Jo Boaler (and many of us who work in the field) is NOT about making math easier. To the contrary, if you emulate Japan (which we do in a US way) it makes math both harder and more enjoyable. And, I'll state categorically more practice if it's badly designed practice (look in any US textbook) is counterproductive.

Reference (yes, I know these were wealthy districts): https://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr251.shtml

So will methods used in Japan work in the USA, even though they don't include anything about the legacy of slavery, since Japan has been pretty racially homogenous for centuries?

(I completely agree about the uselessness of bad practice, but the point is that students improve math skills by doing math, rather than by talking about what sort of historical and cultural factors may be obstacles.)

[jimbogumbo]

I don't understand why it's relevant whether or not a government agency approved these terrible decisions.  I'm not claiming they're part of a curriculum or anything. Secundem_artem gave an ironic example of racist math. We believed it, and were mocked. I gave these examples as a way of showing that it wasn't unreasonable for us to believe that these examples might be real.

The disagreements here, and in society in general, are not primarily between progressives and white supremacists (who are a tiny, if vocal, minority.) They're between the progressives and the large part of the population who don't think introducing identity politics into everything helps.

The pedagogical techniques that are most effective in math are probably the same in Sweden, Singapore, and Sudan. Do kids in India need to study the history of the caste system in math class in order to learn math? Math is a skill, and the most important thing is practice. More practice is the way to better skills, and the more time devoted to practice the better. Any time spent on social philosophy detracts from that. If you want to remind teachers to use "Jamal" instead of "Jim" in your word problems, fine, but that doesn't require a whole "decolonized" curriculum (whatever that would be).

And with those examples like the gang-related math questions? My guess is that they've been used by math teachers trying to get their disengaged students interested, and a teacher with a good rappoort with students may even have gotten laughs from some of those very students because of it. Humour is context-sensitive; what may be funny in one context may not in another, and whether something was offensive to the students in the room can't be determined without talking to them.

You left out Japan and the Netherlands.

The reference I made above to Jo Boaler (and many of us who work in the field) is NOT about making math easier. To the contrary, if you emulate Japan (which we do in a US way) it makes math both harder and more enjoyable. And, I'll state categorically more practice if it's badly designed practice (look in any US textbook) is counterproductive.

Reference (yes, I know these were wealthy districts): https://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr251.shtml

So will methods used in Japan work in the USA, even though they don't include anything about the legacy of slavery, since Japan has been pretty racially homogenous for centuries?

(I completely agree about the uselessness of bad practice, but the point is that students improve math skills by doing math, rather than by talking about what sort of historical and cultural factors may be obstacles.)

Of course. When most of us who are mathematically trained and work with classroom teachers the idea of inclusivity has nothing to do with current trends. We've been playing Whack-a-Mole for decades. We help implement methods on a small scale (the Chicago area project referenced above was one of the largest, but still small by US standards), which work for quite some time and then disappear as new teachers come in. The efforts have not been sustainable nor scalable, as the US system seems impervious to any real change.

Fun (?) sidetrack: I once had two students interview for a job, and the Principal asked how they would use the Civil War to teach algebra. Now, there is a great deal of cool math that can be taught in the context of the Civil War (and no, I'm talking about the thread topic), but it really isn't algebra. People who don't understand what teaching math in context means, or that inclusivity is completely entwined with higher expectations for all students are making the decisions.

I'm leaving now, and probably going to day drink.

[apl68]

I don't understand why it's relevant whether or not a government agency approved these terrible decisions.  I'm not claiming they're part of a curriculum or anything. Secundem_artem gave an ironic example of racist math. We believed it, and were mocked. I gave these examples as a way of showing that it wasn't unreasonable for us to believe that these examples might be real.

The disagreements here, and in society in general, are not primarily between progressives and white supremacists (who are a tiny, if vocal, minority.) They're between the progressives and the large part of the population who don't think introducing identity politics into everything helps.

The pedagogical techniques that are most effective in math are probably the same in Sweden, Singapore, and Sudan. Do kids in India need to study the history of the caste system in math class in order to learn math? Math is a skill, and the most important thing is practice. More practice is the way to better skills, and the more time devoted to practice the better. Any time spent on social philosophy detracts from that. If you want to remind teachers to use "Jamal" instead of "Jim" in your word problems, fine, but that doesn't require a whole "decolonized" curriculum (whatever that would be).

And with those examples like the gang-related math questions? My guess is that they've been used by math teachers trying to get their disengaged students interested, and a teacher with a good rappoort with students may even have gotten laughs from some of those very students because of it. Humour is context-sensitive; what may be funny in one context may not in another, and whether something was offensive to the students in the room can't be determined without talking to them.

You left out Japan and the Netherlands.

The reference I made above to Jo Boaler (and many of us who work in the field) is NOT about making math easier. To the contrary, if you emulate Japan (which we do in a US way) it makes math both harder and more enjoyable. And, I'll state categorically more practice if it's badly designed practice (look in any US textbook) is counterproductive.

Reference (yes, I know these were wealthy districts): https://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr251.shtml

So will methods used in Japan work in the USA, even though they don't include anything about the legacy of slavery, since Japan has been pretty racially homogenous for centuries?

(I completely agree about the uselessness of bad practice, but the point is that students improve math skills by doing math, rather than by talking about what sort of historical and cultural factors may be obstacles.)

I used to know one of our local high school math teachers.  She was a college English and education major--who barely graduated--and worked for some years in daycares before eventually passing her qualifying exam to teach K-12.  Since it is exceedingly rare for people with an aptitude for math to want to teach K-12 in the U.S.--they're in such short supply that they can make better money anywhere else--the school was prepared to pay a new teacher a premium if she was willing to go through a brief qualifying program for math teachers and become a math teacher.  This aspiring teacher did so.

She had no aptitude for or interest in math at all.  Her personal finances were an absolute disaster due to her inability and unwillingness to apply her theoretical math knowledge--such as it was--to the real-world business of personal finance.  She once told me in so many words that she couldn't understand why she was paying and paying on her student loans, and yet the amount she owed never went down.  This was because she persisted in paying minimum--i.e. interest-only--payments on her loan, and never grasped the fact that interest on a loan means paying extra. 

This person was not fairly representative of K-12 math teachers in the U.S.  She had mental instability and drug use issues, and was laid off by the school district when it consolidated schools.  It was their way of getting rid of a poorly-performing teacher without going through the formal firing process.  But the fact that somebody like this got hired by a school district in the first place, and was allowed to teach for three years, and was then hired by another school district in another town, suggests something about how desperately hard-up most American school systems are for skilled math teachers.

[marshwiggle]

Fun (?) sidetrack: I once had two students interview for a job, and the Principal asked how they would use the Civil War to teach algebra.

I sincerely wish at least one of them had asked the Principal how s/he would use algebra to teach the Civil War. The confused look in response would illustrate the bone-headedness of the original question.

[Parasaurolophus]

Perhaps I should point out that many of Anglophone Canada's textbooks are produced by Houghton Mifflin (IIRC my first non-H-M math textbook was in grade 9). And they're not made to order. Until I took math in French, I remember countless cases of imperial measurements and using the size of Texas as a reference point. The latter was particularly confusing for me in elementary school, because I had no idea what Texas was or why its size mattered. When I discovered it's substantially smaller than ten provinces and territorties (and barely bigger than one), I was even more confused.

So, remember: what goes for the Texas school curriculum doesn't just influence the rest of the US. It influences Canada, too. secundem_artem's case was made in jest, but it's not implausible.

Serious, non-ironic question: do you know of any research done on Canadian schoolchildren about stereotype threat?

No, I don't. Why do you ask?

IIRC, the stereotype threat literature has mostly not survived replication--at least, as far as the direct, immediate effects are concerned. (We do know that to the extent that these stereotypes are reflected in our social behaviour, they do have an effect on people's self-perception and their beliefs about what opportunities are available to them.)

Puget would know more (and better). I'm just relying on memory.

[Stockmann]

Do also bear in mind that the Canadian education system is currently one of the finest in the world, and pretty much unique in that there are no significant racial, class, immigration status, or other disparities between students in the system (or systems, since each province has its own) (with the partial exception of Indigenous children on reserve, but that's another story). We're not broken like US is.

In other words, the kids are alright.

While certainly not bad, according to Pisa tests it's behind basically everywhere in East Asia in math.

[dismalist]

Fun (?) sidetrack: I once had two students interview for a job, and the Principal asked how they would use the Civil War to teach algebra.

I sincerely wish at least one of them had asked the Principal how s/he would use algebra to teach the Civil War. The confused look in response would illustrate the bone-headedness of the original question.

Perhaps twenty years ago I got a whiff of what progressive math education means. There was a division question on my daughter's homework, from the text, 20 ice cream cones and 10 kids. What is the fair number of ice cream cones for each kid? Fair? How about equal? And equal does not mean the same thing as fair.  I actually brought this up with the teacher. She had no clue what I was talking about.

I think teaching math in racial-centric ways is nothing more than an invitation to redefine words and influence kids that way. The teachers sure as hell won't be able to do any math!

[quasihumanist]

Math education won't improve until we get better teachers.  Nothing else really matters.  The bureaucrats keep looking for a magic solution because getting better teachers across the board is expensive, and education departments keep pretending to look for one because that's how they get funded, but there isn't one.

Actually, I'm becoming slowly convinced that most people are cognitively incapable of any epistemology better than finding a prophet and listening to him (and it's usually him), in which case none of it matters.

[jimbogumbo]

Fun (?) sidetrack: I once had two students interview for a job, and the Principal asked how they would use the Civil War to teach algebra.

I sincerely wish at least one of them had asked the Principal how s/he would use algebra to teach the Civil War. The confused look in response would illustrate the bone-headedness of the original question.

Perhaps twenty years ago I got a whiff of what progressive math education means. There was a division question on my daughter's homework, from the text, 20 ice cream cones and 10 kids. What is the fair number of ice cream cones for each kid? Fair? How about equal? And equal does not mean the same thing as fair.  I actually brought this up with the teacher. She had no clue what I was talking about.

I think teaching math in racial-centric ways is nothing more than an invitation to redefine words and influence kids that way. The teachers sure as hell won't be able to do any math!

Remember that test and homework questions are written as piecework by typically under qualified drones. The authors were trying to reference a phrase from Game Theory which is actually necessary for the problem to be solved in the desired way. The teacher ideally should have known this (but in practice little chance there is little chance of it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_division

[dismalist]

Surely you jest, Dr. Feynman! The ed school geniuses who commission or write arithmetic textbooks couldn't even spell game theory. :-)

[jimbogumbo]

Heh. They don't even know where the term comes from (it actually has been around a lot longer than game Theory). They are just told fair division is a thing.