I teach K-5. Memorization is frowned on by some orthodoxies, but I’m suspicious of orthodoxies. Folks who adhere too closely to any specific pedagogical ideological approach abandon useful tools for teaching.
I think that’s primary school age. Times tables are memorised, or were until calculators, and I think operations on single digits usually would be. My experience was that kids who were bad at maths relied on memorization more
Back on topic, would you say that CRT informs how you teach maths, not what you teach? And do you treat kids differently depending on their race? Cos that’s what people are claiming about CRT.
This is a whole, fascinating conversation, and I can (and have) gone on at length about it; but it’ll be a hijack here.
I think that your first question gets a “yes”: I can’t think of a way CRT would influence what I teach in math, except that I make sure kids know about, for example, the Persian roots of algebra and whatnot, that the history of math isn’t portrayed as a white history. But I don’t teach much of that at the elementary level anyway.
I don’t treat kids differently based on their race, but I do treat kids differently based on their selves. And social construction of race is one of many influences on a person’s self.
So, a (hypothetical) kid comes to my class, and he’s black. I’m not going to be like, “Oh, he’s gonna need a lot of hip-hop if I want him to learn math, I better use a lot of flocabulary in class.” That’d be dumb. A kid comes to my class and she’s white. I’m not gonna be like, “Oh, she’s gonna need a lot of quiet time if I want her to learn math, I better assign a lot of tests.” That’d be dumb.
Instead, I look at my class, at the cultural background of my students, and I try to design lessons that meet all their needs. In doing so, thinking about race can be helpful, because there are some connections between cultural backgrounds and race in the United States; but it’s not determinative, the individual kids are determinative.
And it figures into discipline. Years ago, on the playground, Alice rubbed Charles’s head, and Charles pushed her down and screamed at her. Both kids were Black. We White teachers were all like, Charles, this was an unprovoked attack, what the fuck, dude? But a Black assistant came over and talked with us: she told us that she grew up in the same specific neighborhood as Charles, and in that culture, touching someone’s head without permission was a hugely provoking insult. It didn’t excuse Charles’s action, but it prompted us to have a chat with Alice as well.
If these things seem obvious and common-sense to you, that’s kind of the point.
- Being aware of race as a social construct that influences culture in multiple ways
- Being aware that kids are culturally-situated individuals and that knowing about culture can inform (but not replace) knowledge about them as individuals,
- Being aware that good teachers are culturally responsive and don’t just assume that their own culture is like default human behavior, any deviance from which should be punished
These are what I get from CRT, as relates to education.
You could start a new thread about it, it sounds interesting and would make a nice change from depressing politics.
Yeah, they do. Assuming culture just feeds into understanding the kids better wrt discipline, and not different rules for different groups, which it doesn’t sound like you’re doing. None of it reads like what’s mentioned in Trump’s EO banning CRT training, anyway.
This is overwhelmingly how I see teachers grappling with race (in my field, CRT means Culturally Responsive Teaching, so the acronym keeps throwing me for a loop). We’re not generally engaging on the level of high theory: we’re engaging on the level of “how can I notice practices that are racist and stop doing them?”
Yesterday afternoon, for example, we had an interesting discussion in our equity team meeting. Background: due to systemic racism, our entire administrative team is White, and we have zero Black teachers (I think we have two Latinx teachers and one Asian teacher and the rest are White), and our entire cafeteria team and the majority of our custodial team is Black, and most of our (hugely underpaid) instructional assistants are Black. Our equity team has one Black member.
So we were talking about discipline disproportionality. Our school is something like 15% Black students, but Black boys make up about 50% of discipline referrals (i.e., sending kids to the office for misbehavior).
There are different theories, including some ugly ones which I’m including for the sake of completeness.
- Black boys are naturally worse-behaved.
- It’s not race, it’s economics! We’re economically stratified in our town, and we’re really seeing the effects of poverty.
- Teachers are just plain racist.
- Okay, some teachers are just plain racist and are driving the disproportionate stats.
- White teachers are misinterpreting behaviors associated with Black culture as disrespect/defiance, when that’s not what the kids mean; or they’re exaggerating the degree of disrespect/defiance. A White girl who purses her lips and raises her eyebrows might be expressing exactly the same thought as a Black boy who turns away muttering “You gettin on my NERVES”, but only the latter kid gets the referral, because to a White teacher steeped in White culture the latter kid’s expression of disrespect is out of bounds.
I suggested something like #5 in the meeting, and I got pushback from the lone Black member. She worried that we would veer too far in the opposite direction, that we would tolerate disrespect/defiance from Black boys at elementary school, and then when they hit middle school, suddenly behaviors that had been okay before would be unacceptable, and they’d get hammered. Or in high school, or once they graduated.
CRT, under either acronym, doesn’t lend itself to easy answers. Colorblindness does. But I think the easy answers are overwhelmingly the wrong answers.
It’s sort of ironic your equity team only has one black member. Is it mostly composed of teachers and the other staff weren’t invited, or down to interest or who has the time, or what?
(OT, but isn’t teaching very unionised in America? Can instructional assistants join the teaching union?)
I think your colleague has a good point about discipline. Students need to learn to fit into the majority culture and how to act differently in different situations, same as learning code switching in language (even if that just means making their lack of respect less obvious). Does the proportion of discipline referrals change with age? If older black boys make up a smaller proportion than younger ones, than maybe what you’re doing now is working. If it increases with age then you’ve got bigger problems.
Are there other male teachers at the school, and do you teach all subjects or only maths?
Our school’s salaried employees (i.e., the ones who can be asked to stay after-hours for additional meetings like this one) are almost exclusively White. Hourly employees either have to volunteer, or have to find a way to adjust their other hourly duties so they can be at these meetings. It’s not remotely an ideal situation, and it bothers me that we don’t make it possible for cafeteria staff (for example) to have a representative on the committee. This is some of that systemic racism I talked about: there are really strong historical forces in our city and state that lead to the racial disparity among staff.
Yer gonna make me cry here. I’m the president of our local union, but I live in one of the most anti-union states in the nation. Any contract we try to negotiate is legally unenforceable, and if we strike, we face six months in jail.
That said, all staff can join the union for full benefits, and staff from lower-paid positions (e.g., instructional assistants) pay much lower dues.
I 100% agree she makes a good point. I also 100% agree that teachers need to be aware of how office referrals impact students, and how racial disparities in office referrals get interpreted by kids, and how cultural differences can sometimes lead to teachers misinterpreting the behavior of students.
Like I say, there aren’t easy answers.
For my first thirteen years I taught whole classes at second, third, or fourth grade, all subjects. I’ve started a new position this year as the Academically/Intellectually Gifted teacher, which means I teach all kinds of stuff to kids across the school, including math. I teach grades 1-5 and provide consultation for kindergarten.
An interesting case is Daniel Everett’s experience of failing to teach a group of Pirahã people even basic arithmetic like 1+1 or counting to 10. Besides the language barrier, the culture is, at least traditionally, concerned only with matters that fall within direct personal experience.
Moderating:
That’s not what he said. Don’t be a jerk.
So the salaried employees are required to attend the meetings, but the hourly ones can’t be? And no one’s going to pay them overtime in order to attend. I don’t blame them for not volunteering.
Seriously? How is that possible? Here in the UK the Tories are trying to prevent strikes by requiring >50% of all members vote in favour, rather than just >50% of voters (and they already ban voting in the workplace or any other measures to increase turnout). But putting staff in jail for striking is a whole other level. Which state do you live in?
I was wondering if it was the union’s fault the assistant positions were so badly paid, but it must be hard for them to do anything useful under those conditions!
Maybe you need more discipline options, but that’s hard for the teachers. I’m trying to remember primary school - so long time ago 
. There was lots of boring sitting quietly filling in worksheets as I recall, but your school must be very different if there are enough pupils to have a teacher just for gifted kids.
Alex Bellos’s Here’s Looking at Euclid has a similarly fascinating story about the experiences of anthropologist Pierre Pica studying a Munduruku community deep in the Amazon rainforest. Likewise, they don’t have numeracy as we understand it beyond the first few counting numbers.
One hypothesis, that seems very plausible to me, is that exact abstract quantification (as opposed to practical quantitative estimation not measured with precise number values) is a comparatively recent development among humans. It might have emerged as recently as 10-12 Kyears ago, possibly in response to the start of sedentary agriculture and the start of urbanization.
Before that time, making up specific sets of number words to differentiate individual integers greater than five or so, and working out operational rules to compute with them to produce numerically exact answers, might just have seemed to every human on earth like a massive pointless waste of time. Blows my tiny mind right away.
Perhaps. But the way the subtext reads to me is that there is a racial disparity in math achievement and that’s because math is racist.
So some posters are saying that the “math is racist” idea is about graduate level math and which mathemeticians get noticed (a problem with every academic field of study) and other posters are saying that its is the pedagogy and how math is taught that makes it racist.
You are arguing against the weaker of the two ideas. I don’t blame you for picking the lower hanging fruit. I mean, I can see how a kid in kindergarten might learn the times tables through song and dance but by the time you are doing word problems where you have to conceptualize words into math problems, I don’t see how you can effectively teach that through song and dance.
You learned the times tables in kindergarten? 
Some schools start on multiplication in 1st grade. Mine didn’t, but one sibling’s did.
And in third grade, we didn’t have dance per se re: multiplication, but we did have have song and . . . motion? I don’t recall the specifics, but one activity involved walking around singing and passing beanbags. Another standing on our chairs for some reason. I can’t speak to efficacy vs other methods but I did learn my tables.
The times table is just another form of counting. If you can sing your ABCs you can sing the times tables. If you want to throw some dancing in there, I don’t see why not. but if you have some kids singing and dancing in 4th grade, I don’t know how you can effectively run a classroom with other kids that are sitting at a desk. And the current
This country has told itself that math is harder than it actually is. I don’t know why we are gaslighting ourselves.
- How familiar are you with the idea of mnemonics?
- There’s a whole website, Flocabulary, that specializes in hip-hop songs full of mnemonics for math at all grade levels. Thirty seconds of searching finds this video, with tricks for figuring out which operation you’ll use in solving a word problem. I might quibble with some of the advice in that video (I’m not in a place to listen to it, and “key words” instruction is full of pitfalls, but that’s another subject), but I definitely have used other videos, e.g., a video that repeats the concept of perimeter with an underlying beat.
- One of the best math teachers I know teaches fifth grade math. I remember once watching her with her class in the hall as they waited for the PE teacher. She’d been teaching them how to create line plots, and she asked students to demonstrate their dance mnemonics for remembering the X and Y axis for line plots (students often get confused and will for example put the time on the Y axis).
- Equivalent fractions are really hard for students to grasp. Having students stand up and move around the room in groups can be really helpful. In a class of 20 students, “Let’s get y’all divided into two equal groups. How many are in one of those groups? That’s right, 10. 1/2 of 20 students is 10 students. Now divide into four equal groups. How many are in each of those groups? That’s right, 5. 1/4 of 20 is 5. But how many are in two of those groups? Ten, right? 2/4 of 20 students is 10 students. Wait, that’s exactly the same as 1/2 of 20, WOAHHHH!” and so on. It’s one model among many, and the movement is key.
- Plenty of students need movement opportunities in order to concentrate. If you don’t provide them, they get fidgety and distract their classmates and can’t pay attention anyway. Give the class those movement opportunities, and everyone learns better.
In general, I don’t. There are times to sit quietly at a desk for everyone, and there are times for everyone to be talking in small groups, and there are times to be singing and dancing. (I’m really bad at this last category, but that’s me as a teacher; other upper elementary teachers are way better at it than I am).
I think you present a fairly attractive package as a teacher.
If we actually raised teacher pay to reflect how important everyone SAYS education is to them, you are one of the teachers that would still have a job after all the lawyers and doctors decided to start teaching for a living.
I appreciate this–but remember, this is an area where I’m less good than my peers.
It’s very possible I’m in a bubble of excellent teachers. I can’t really speak to teachers outside of my district. But the stuff I see teachers in my district doing, every single day, gives me a lot of hope for the profession.
Back to the thread’s topic, there are really good reasons for incorporating culturally relevant instruction into school; and critical race theory helps folks navigate how to do this.