Here’s what bubbles up unbidden in the minds of educators on Christmas Break, after they get wind of embedded “projects” like that outlined below. We’ll set aside the ranting and cries of “Am I taking crazy pills?! Doesn’t anyone else see this?!”
Rethinking “Rethinking Mathematics”
A Review of A Zany, Fun Approach to Mathematics Education!
As 2009 winds down its tumultuous track and heads into 2010, let us begin the next year in a Spirit of Cooperation & Unity. After that, well. Who knows? But we can at least begin by all agreeing that this is a travesty on ice.
The supplemental textbook Rethinking Mathematics is part of the all-devouring “Rethinking Schools” project, and goes wrong pretty much at the subtitle:
Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers
Let’s let the project’s proponents speak for the text:
“This unique collection of more than 30 articles shows teachers how to weave social-justice principles throughout the math curriculum…”
“Rethinking Mathematics will help teachers develop students’ understanding of society and prepare them to be critical, active participants in a democracy.”
“I thought math was just a subject they implanted on us just because they felt like it, but now I realize that you could use math to defend your rights and realize the injustices around you…”[9th grade student]
And my favorite:
“With clarity and insight, this book shows how teachers who are dedicated to social justice can act on their commitments in a subject that has, for too long, been seen as simply a technical area.”
Huzzah! We can finally inject social justice propaganda into one a’ them “technical” areas of study! Because, you know, there’s really no such thing as objective truths, technical studies, or subjects that parents can rely on to be agenda-free!
Now, truth to tell, I am as guilty as the next fellow (if the next fellow happens to be a high school and college math teacher) when it comes to making political asides in math class. I use it as a way to loosen students up for the educational jabs to follow, and I have been fairly sure to keep it even-handed. So much so, that students will ask what type of politics I adhere to. I don’t tell, unless I am speaking with ex-students, now adults. And I certainly don’t design a mathematical curriculum around anything but math.
This is, according to the good people at Rethinking Schools, my fatal error!
Of course, the Rethinking Schools project goes to great lengths to talk generically about “education reform” as if they were interested in – um – education reform, as opposed to political posturing and promotion. But as you can see below, educational reform is perhaps the furthest thing from their collective Hive-Mind, if by “educational reform” you thought “more concentrated study time” or “longer school years” or “smaller class sizes”. No, indeedy! Now, I can have the politics of social justice – in all of its one-sided, Howard Zinniness – actually written into the curriculum of a scientific philosophy course!
I can see how social justice, social theology, and the like, can be “implanted” (as our 9th grader, above, says) in some courses. Even my son, just down the hall from me, is subjected to daily doses of that kind of nonsense by my colleague, the US history teacher. Being a Princeton-educated New Yorker, I suppose he can’t help but use Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History” as his principle textbook on US history, and he’s not even kidding around. I asked him. But there you go, you know? It’s US history. There’s nothing objective about that (some may pause here, to chuckle).
But math?
I promised the Powers That Be of this site that I would provide laughs-a-plenty in some of my posts, and I like to start with a light-hearted essay, so let’s just cut to the Table of Contents of this supplemental material and get a li’l peek at the balanced, impartial agenda:
Chapter 1:
Teaching Suggestions: Disparities in Wealth Cartoon — 13
Activity Box: No-TV Week Math — 14
Driving While Black or Brown: A Math Project About Racial Profiling — 16
… what’s that, you say? Stop, you say? No more? Oh my; there’s more!
Chapter 2:
The War in Iraq Boondocks Cartoon — 20
Activity Box: Using Math to Take a Critical Look at How the Unemployment Rate Is Determined — 23
The War in Iraq: How Much Does It Cost? — 29
Chapter 3:
Race, Retrenchment, and the
Reform of School Mathematics — 31
by William F. Tate
Environmental Hazards:
Is Environmental Racism Real? — 41
Chapter 4:
Historical, Cultural, and Social Implications of Mathematics
by S. E. Anderson — 43
That’s Chapter 4, by the way, in its entirety. This is the end – of Part 1.
If we delve a little deeper, can we discern what areas of mathematics will be examined and practiced in the “rethought” course? Nope. Math, after all, is not the point of a math class! You silly!
Here’s a “resource” for Chapter 3:
“The teaching of mathematics needs to be connected to the lives and experiences of African-American students, thereby enabling them to take part fully in our democracy. …”
You see, according to Mr. Tate, African-Americans are different types of folk, They can only take part fully in democracy by having math connected to their experiences:
No connection = no learning math = no participation in democracy! “QED,” as the philosophers say!
“the disciplines that undergird mathematics education– mathematics and psychology– place great stress on objectivity and neutrality. As a result, school mathematics has been tacitly accepted as a colorblind discipline. Thus very little consideration is given to the cultural appropriateness of mathematics pedagogy.”
I know what you are thinking:
(a) there doesn’t seem to be much mention of “mathematics” in this supplemental text, and
(2) you never knew that psychology undergirded math education, as does mathematics! I don’t know how people got along in the 5,000 years or so before the White Man invented psychologically-based math education and foisted it on all Persons of Color. I’m beginning to wonder how the Greeks, Egyptians and Mayans even got up in the morning.
And for those of you who were thinking that a phrase like “the cultural appropriateness of mathematics pedagogy” is bullcrap, I can assure you: yes; it is bullcrap. Except to persons who have adopted a view that people of different races somehow can’t learn math good at the same rate, due solely to their race and culture. In some circles, this is known as “racist” thinking.
I myself wouldn’t call it that, so much as “mallet-headed obtuseness,” or perhaps “so intent on seeing things your way that you refuse to consider ample evidence contradicting your cherished point of view.”
So, to sum up the review: this supplemental textbook sucks, for a math class. However, it might make fun, supplemental reading for any history or sociology class lucky enough to use anything besides a Zinn-style textbook as a main text. For the balance, you see. Contrast. All that stuff that schools used to cherish.
But, in the main, I recommend the reasonable approach is to hope that the book disappears and is never heard from again, and never gets updates beyond the (c) 2005 edition. Of course, if it did, how would they fare, now that President Obama is in the White House?
