Saw this on Twitter, a booklet on ‘anti-racist’ mathematics instruction that apparently has been sent out to teachers in Oregon.
I had a look through it, and the actual suggestions seem pretty similar to previous educational reform efforts. Some sound good, some bad, some impractical. Who knows if any of them have been tested? In many cases it’s not clear what they have to do with White Supremacy, and IMHO it’s a toss-up whether this will help children or harm them.
Glancing through that PDF:
…“the focus is on getting the right answer”……well, yeah. This isn’t Renaissance philosophy. If a teacher asks what five times seven is and the answer given is “48,” even the wokest, most tolerant teacher ought to mark that incorrect.
Could we have a summary, for those with better things to do than read through an 82-page PDF?
The big one I’d been seeing today was about “Show your work” being “White Supremacy” due to “paternalism” and “worship of the written word”. I can see the argument for “explain the importance of [event]” versus listing a bunch of rote dates and factoids but, in math, knowing how it works is important and foundational for later applications. Maybe you can noodle it out or mentally eyeball it as its own problem but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do the same when it’s part of a more intensive multistep math process. Showing your work seems pretty important. "Worship of the [mathematical formula] seems appropriate here and not part of The Man keeping you down.
I don’t agree with each of their assessments on what is an example of white supremacy culture in math classes.
Maybe someone more familiar with philosophy can explain what makes math objective or subjective. But it seems to me if I ask a 3rd grader to divide 16 by 4 then I shouldn’t tell him his answer of 6 is correct.
Some of their examples to combat this form of white supremacy is to have students create TikTok videos, silent films, or cartoons about mathematical concepts or procedures.
I thought it was funny that both showing your work and a focus on getting the “right” answer are considered bad and white supremacist.
Less funny that they speak of teaching objectivity as something to avoid…
That’s what I meant about some of their suggestions being impractical. It might be fun and even useful to do this once a term, but not as a regular teaching tool.
I glanced at that as well, but I parsed it differently.
I would say that getting the right answer is important, and the goal, but the focus should be on the process, understanding the steps required to get to the right answer.
In an absolute sense, of course there is only one right answer. But, the kid that flubs a complex problem because he miscalculated by one digit in the last step is, in a sense, more “right” than the kid that screwed up completely because he had no idea what steps to take to solve the problem.
Of course, I have no idea what that has to do with race, or if that’s what the author even meant, because I’m not reading a 82 page document either. But I glanced at it and saw what you saw, and I had a different take on it.
You know what actually promotes white supremacist ideas? Folks claiming that garbage like this is what “racial equality” means.
Now math is racist??? I didn’t get that memo.
OK, on the one hand, this is actually kind of a good suggestion that may help some students – it’s entirely possible that a student who struggles with language might grasp a mathematical concept perfectly well but be unable to explain it in writing. But, as phrased, it sounds like they think nonwhite students are more likely to have problems expressing themselves in writing / words in general, which surely, surely isn’t a good thing to imply when you’re trying to present yourself as antiracist! (I mean, I haven’t read the whole document, so I may be missing some context, but that does sound pretty awful.)
Yeah, lots of bizarre thinking in that one. Some nuggets of goodness - “Language skills being equated with proficiency” for example. But lots of scattershot thinking without a lot of explanation for why the various modes of teaching are “racist”.
To put a little context on the OP, Fox News reported that a flyer sent to Oregon math teachers from the Oregon DOE included a link to this website along with another link to register for a “micro course”. This document has absolutely nothing to do with approved teaching in Oregon or the state-mandated curriculum. You can see the flyer here: Math Educator Update: February 2021
Since showing your work and ‘procedural fluency is preferred over conceptual knowledge’ are also white supremacist ideas according to the document, your interpretation is unlikely to be correct.
What they actually say is “Choose problems that have complex, competing, or multiple answers.” And “Engage with true problem solving.”
You still wouldn’t know what it has to do with race or white supremacy had you read it because the authors’ don’t cover it in this document. Of course this document isn’t designed to persuade you to their way of thinking. It’s more for teachers who are already aboard.
Which is why we were asked to show our work, in our time.
Which suggests to me that the philosophical principle at work is more one of avoiding imprinting on the students that “problems” necessarily have one right solution that is arrived at by one objective path – which happens to be the one handed down by authority(*).
But that seems to tell me part of the problem ( 
) is that we call these exercises in mathematical thinking, “problems”. So we’re getting, like, deep, Maaaan…
(* Which established-authority view of the world by default is called “white supremacy” because, something or another)
I skimmed through it and it mostly looked like bullshit. I mean the guide seemed to incorporate some stuff about dismantling culturally biased teaching methods. But it seems like that could be applied to any subject matter. The nice thing about math is that it’s consistent for everyone.
But that is the importance of “showing your work”. It shows that Kid A almost got it right, and a quick explanation from the teacher should put Kid A on the right track. If Kid B got it really, really wrong, then that tells the teacher to spend a lot more time with Kid B to get the process fixed.
This booklet is mostly a questionnaire. It makes some vague suggestions about what a teacher can do, but that’s all. It doesn’t try to give some specific examples of ways in which a teacher could teach some specific mathematical idea in a good way and a bad way.
Perhaps this is not relevant to this booklet, but let me give you an example of way a good mathematics student could do a calculation and demonstrate a deeper understanding of what’s going on than the teacher realizes. Suppose the teacher says, “Go to the blackboard and add 47 and 15.” The student goes to it and writes, “47 + 15 = 64.” The teacher says, “That’s not right.” The student says, “It is if you’re using base 8 instead of base 10. 7 and 5 equals 14 in base 8. So put 4 in the rightmost column for the answer. 4 + 1 plus the 1 which was carried equals 6, so put 6 in the column to the left of that. That makes the answer 64.” I remember that one of the first things that got me interested in becoming a mathematician was learning about the different bases for numbers.
If you’re a mathematician, you should understand that notational conventions are also part of being right, and that basic arithmetic assumes base 10 unless otherwise specified. The student in your example may be interested in other bases, which is great, but they’re still wrong, and they’re being kind of obnoxious. Also, they’re wasting the time of other students who may now be more confused by looking at the base-8 work that they don’t understand.
Encouraging enthusiastic students to explore more deeply is great, but not at the cost of monopolizing precious classroom time and confusing other students.
I really wonder how they came up with their list, and what eg showing your work has to do with white supremacy. A few of the things are obvious, with most it’s obscure.