There Is Nothing That Can’t Be “Woke” – Including Math
[guest post by Dana]
Because you knew that, eventually, even math would be sucked up into that swirling vortex of silly wokeness and that a city like Seattle would be the place to birth the movement in public school curriculum :
Seattle’s four-page framework is still in the proposal stage. If adopted, its ideas will be included in existing math classes as part of the district’s broader effort to infuse ethnic studies into all subjects across the K-12 spectrum. Tracy Castro-Gill, Seattle’s ethnic studies director, said her team hopes to have frameworks completed in all subjects by June for board approval.
If the frameworks are approved, teachers would be expected to incorporate those ideas and questions into the math they teach beginning next fall, Castro-Gill said. No districtwide—or mandated—math/ethnic studies curriculum is planned, but groups of teachers are working with representatives of local community organizations to write instructional units for teachers to use if they wish, she said.
“Seattle is definitely on the forefront with this,” said Robert Q. Berry III, the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “What they’re doing follows the line of work we hope we can move forward as we think about the history of math and who contributes to that, and also about deepening students’ connection with identity and agency.”
But seriously, when “power and oppression” and “history of resistance and liberation” become a focal point in math curriculum, is it really math being taught?
Anyway, Robby Soave rightly observes:
[H]aving read over the proposed framework, I have to say that it does seem fairly terrible. It’s chock full of social justice jargon that sounds smart but is actually vapid. What does it mean to decode mathematical “beauty” or “identify how the development of mathematics has been erased from learning in school?” (Has it been erased? That seems like a problem for history class.) The guidance says it will “re-humanize mathematics through experiential learning” and facilitate learning “independently and interdependently.” That’s a fancy way of saying almost nothing at all.
The guidance also includes some extremely political, simplistic talking points that might be popular among activist academics but are in reality somewhat dubious. This is verbatim from the proposal: Students will be able to “identify the inherent inequities of the standardized testing system used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color,” “explain how math has been used to exploit natural resources,” and “explain how math dictates economic oppression.” Each of these statements are debatable, but they are not being presented as such. It would be one thing to hold a class discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of standardized testing, but what’s happening here is that students are being trained to reject standardized testing due to its “inherent inequity,” which is asserted as some kind of proven fact.
Having read over the proposed framework myself, and given that I was one of those students who struggled to solve for X, I don’t think this woke math would have helped me out. Instead, I think I would have seen it as just more gibberish on top of the already undecipherable gibberish taunting me from my Algebra book.
(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)
–Dana
How silly it was to think that math and the hard sciences were somehow insulated from an annoying infiltration of wokeness.
Dana (05f22b) — 10/29/2019 @ 9:26 amhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OaYPVueW4
DCSCA (797bc0) — 10/29/2019 @ 9:52 amWoke math does not solve for x. It solves for y, and comes up with all the wrong answers.
Appalled (1a17de) — 10/29/2019 @ 9:53 am“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
Even if that is the “white” answer.
Kevin M (19357e) — 10/29/2019 @ 10:38 amIf this seems Orwellian, that’s because it is. Quite literally.
Kevin M (19357e) — 10/29/2019 @ 10:40 am“…identify the inherent inequities of the standardized testing system used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color,…”
What is amazing is this is taken as a given. It is not even in dispute to these people.
Jimpithecus (ab5d06) — 10/29/2019 @ 11:17 amUltimately, these sorts of policies and frameworks are promulgated by people who understand neither how mathematics nor science actually work but simply fancy themselves self-important. Consequently, their ideas, somehow, have to be important.
Jimpithecus (ab5d06) — 10/29/2019 @ 11:19 amThe new woke math is super easy – no matter the problem, the answer is always going to be 1619. The best part of this is that the answer is still going to be 1619 whether it’s math, history, English, geography, anthropology, economics……
Jerryskids (702a61) — 10/29/2019 @ 12:34 pmUneducated and poorly equipped for succeeding in society. Just how totalitarian regimes across the world desire their drones to become.
NJRob (1f966c) — 10/29/2019 @ 1:30 pmNo it says something, and it’s probably something very disputable.
What this says is that children weill be expected to figure out how to solve math problems on their own without being taught (because when that happens, the knowledge gaineds is so much more ingrained)
Sammy Finkelman (102c75) — 10/29/2019 @ 1:57 pmThere’s woke and then there’s WOKE:
Robby Starbuck
harkin (337580) — 10/29/2019 @ 5:54 pm@robbystarbuck
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“Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, is expected to release from custody two illegal aliens charged with raping children and an illegal alien accused of trafficking heroin.”
_
@9 well somebody sure does keep proclaiming his love of the poorly educated.
Ah, I see this has made it to pop-edu-politics. OK, so I am not a Washington state educator, but I can tell you why this exists. You may or may not have noticed, but there’s been a big push to get more kids into STEM (you better have noticed, one of the conservative education talking points is that kids keep majoring in the “useless” liberal arts). There are all kinds of things people are trying to increase kids’ interest in STEM, summer camps, simple game coding, making slime, all kinds of things. And yes, it would be very nice if people would just look at dryly presented information and fall in love with it, but that isn’t really how most people work. People need some kind of investment in something to want to do it very much, and dry information doesn’t usually provide that.
So, what this looks like is the response to some educational/sociological research somewhere that says that kids don’t think people like them do STEM. They don’t feel connected. So, since all the kids in whatever survey they did think all the math and science came from old white dudes when in fact a bunch of it didn’t, they decided they’d better tell the kids that it didn’t, some of it came from people who were kind of like them. And, yes, it seems to be using the language of “wokeness” because “wokeness” borrowed a lot of their terminology from current sociological research. It’s like hearing people use “Karma” wrong all the time and then getting mad when you hear it even under the correct circumstance.
I do not personally believe that their method is going to make a significant difference in kids being invested in STEM, but they might as well try something.
Nic (896fdf) — 10/29/2019 @ 5:54 pmNic,
Thanks for explaining the woke point if view. Now how does it help teach math when you aren’t teaching math?
NJRob (c59082) — 10/29/2019 @ 6:01 pm”I do not personally believe that their method is going to make a significant difference in kids being invested in STEM, but they might as well try something.”
Nic (896fdf) — 10/29/2019 @ 5:54 pm
You’re assuming that’s the goal. It isn’t.
Munroe (138863) — 10/29/2019 @ 6:06 pm@13, Based on what Nic laid out it’s intended to get students who typically disengage from math to try and learn it.
One of my college professors told me he’d always help students who came to his office because it was a ‘teachable moment’ where the student was honestly trying to assimilate the material, and not just taking notes while only paying 50% attention. Maybe it’s like that. My sister teaches math and chemistry at a public school. She says that a lot of this new stuff works better than you’d expect.
Time123 (69b2fc) — 10/29/2019 @ 6:17 pm@13 (I am going to ignore the insult, but know that I saw it) They are teaching math. What this article is talking about isn’t the math curriculum it’s a way of talking about the curriculum. What it might look like in reality is a solid figure geometry lesson using the pyramids as an example. Theoretically, the history department probably should also be doing a little math when they talk about the history of the pyramids.
@14 How many hours of curriculum development meetings have you sat through?
Nic (896fdf) — 10/29/2019 @ 6:20 pm@15 yes.
Nic (896fdf) — 10/29/2019 @ 6:20 pm“How many hours of curriculum development meetings have you sat through?”
Nic (896fdf) — 10/29/2019 @ 6:20 pm
LOL, an appeal to authority!
Can I play?
How many kids currently in grade school do you have?
Munroe (138863) — 10/29/2019 @ 6:26 pmMunroe really hates answering Nic’s questions. He’s responded to all of them with an obnoxious question today.
Munroe, what is your experience with curriculum development? It’s not fallacious at all to discuss your experience with education development, and your response is bizarrely irrelevant. I know that in internet debate ‘appeal to authority’ is automatically a card to play, but think about what you said for a few seconds.
Dustin (504bb1) — 10/29/2019 @ 6:39 pm@18 All of my more than 1000 kids are in secondary.
If you haven’t been in the curriculum development meetings, you have no idea what the goal is. I have sat in a large number of them and the topic of math curiculuum meetings is “how do we get the kids to do better in math?” That is the goal, kids doing better in math.
Nic (896fdf) — 10/29/2019 @ 6:55 pmThe drones in the public education hive — and they outnumber the workers — making make-work for themselves at the taxpayers’ expense, and what’s even worse the children’s expense, with the help of their fellow political drones.
Just teach the kids to read, write, and figure, dipsticks!
nk (dbc370) — 10/29/2019 @ 7:11 pm@21 but then they’ll grow up and major in “Cultural Studies” and everyone their parents’ age would hate that. 😛
Nic (896fdf) — 10/29/2019 @ 7:18 pmA lot of that sounds like it should be taught in history or civics, if taught at all.
But “beauty” in math is not a new idea. Call it elegant equations, symmetric solutions, wor something else. Euler’s formula is one of the most beautiful things known to mankind:
e^(i pi) = -1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty
Kishnevi (e715ab) — 10/29/2019 @ 7:27 pm@23 There’s a lot of discussion of cross curricular teaching going on right now, so that information taught in one subject area might have been introduced or later be reinforced by another.
Nic (896fdf) — 10/29/2019 @ 7:33 pmBut “beauty” in math is not a new idea.
Pythagoras, the a^{2}+b^{2}=c^{2} guy, thought so too. He is the father of Western music theory and he did it all with math figuring out the intervals between euphonious tones as distances on a taut string. (A rough explanation.)
nk (dbc370) — 10/29/2019 @ 8:07 pm“If you haven’t been in the curriculum development meetings, you have no idea what the goal is. I have sat in a large number of them and the topic of math curiculuum meetings is “how do we get the kids to do better in math?” That is the goal, kids doing better in math.”
Nic (896fdf) — 10/29/2019 @ 6:55 pm
I have no doubt that’s the goal of your curriculum development meetings. I was commenting on the goal of the specific curriculum which is the subject of the post, of which I have as much experience as you.
Munroe (138863) — 10/29/2019 @ 8:16 pm@26 do you ever read something in bureaucrat speak in your area expertise that was writing by someone not you in not your department, but you can still tell what the conversation was that sparked the document? If you have, then you know how I can have a pretty good idea of the conversation behind this document. Most of the time, if you know the wider conversation in which you and someone else are working, you can figure out what part of that wider conversation that person is referencing.
Nic (896fdf) — 10/29/2019 @ 8:24 pmGrades have fallen for decades. As have educational standards. They are linked for an obvious reason. Sheeple are easier to control.
As a bonus, teachers and their unions dont care about educating students. After all, they don’t pay dues. Just ask Randi Weingarten.
NJRob (2cf414) — 10/30/2019 @ 9:25 am