What is Critical Race Theory?

Great Debates
241

Where the fuck is this? I want to move there.

Do you think the gutting of the teacher’s union might be leading to these higher standards?

I don’t think CRT is useless. I think in it’s original form as a legal theory, it was very useful in providing a perspective. But it is not a useful basis to create education policy.

I think too many educators think they are responsible for fixing every bad thing that came out of pandora’s box through education and it’s simply too much. They are the proverbial guy with a big hammer that sees everything as a nail. not all social ills can be fixed by education policy. In their effort to kill the bad things that came out of pandora’s box, they are harming the one good thing without making much of a dent in the bad things.

242

Oh hell no. We haven’t had a real teacher’s union ever here. Morale is one of the biggest problems. The connection you’re drawing definitely isn’t there. But that’s really off-topic.

243

There should be wide latitude in how to teach that maps to individual life experiences and needs. If someone learns math better through song and dance, great. So long as they learn the math.

But what we can’t do is change what to teach based on race, gender, etc. There is no ‘woke math’. There is just math. And if you teach some watered down version to minorities, or pretend that the difficult stuff doesn’t have to be learned because it’s ‘white’ math or whatever, you are not doing them or society any favors.

The same goes with changing the grading standards for different groups. All you are then doing is damaging the value of a diploma or degree earned hy a minority, because prospective employers will not be able to judge their knowledge and aptitude from their grades.

All of this strikes me as an attempt to compensate for the fact that public schools in predominantly minority areas are often horrific. Rather than tackle the very hard problem of reforming schools and neighborhoods in trouble, we pretend that the problem is due to racism in the subjects themselves, rather than the failed communities and schools the students are subjected to when young.

244

I am unaware of any currently-employed educator (that hyphenated adjective is there to forestall your digging up some Twitter crank who has no influence) who would disagree with that second paragraph. I think it’s a canard.

245

Isn’t there a current debate in some colleges about giving preferential grades to minorities? I’m sure I recently read about a prof at either UCLA or Berkeley who was reprimanded for refusing to adjust the grades for black students as the administration was demanding.

And if this stuff isn’t in current public schools, it’s certainly being debated and promoted in education faculties in some universities. The time to oppose this nonsense is now, before children have to be exposed to it.

This reminds me of when ‘cancel culture’ was only in universities, and those of us who opposed it then were told, “Hey, it’s only college. College kids do crazy radical stuff, then they grow up. It’s not like they are coming tor people’s jobs…”

But college kids graduate, and take thrir ideas into the workforce. And that includes teachers.

246

My school taught it in 2nd grade, but I was in a mixed 1st and 2nd grade class and at first grade was already helping my older peers(?) with them. However, I don’t remember if I memorized times tables per se or just remembered things by doing them so often. I may not have used a formal times table since I remember the school bus driver teaching us the two-hand mnemonic for multiplying numbers 6 through 9 and numbers 1 through 5 are easy to remember (and the latter fact is, indeed, crucial to the success of the former.)

I must have a bad episodic memory from that time period because while I also learned to read early I don’t remember learning these things. Except the 2-handed mnemonic, which was memorable since it came from an unusual source in the bus driver.

247

You’re sure. I’m not.

248

Well whaddya know, turns out I was right.

What REALLY happened is that, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, a Black student asked a professor to consider changing exam policies. It’s unclear to me whether the student really asked for this for only Black students, or if they asked for changes to policies in general. The proposals didn’t include changes in grading, but rather changes in exam length, the ability of an exam to help-but-not-hurt students, etc.

The professor responded with a snide, snarky email to the student. And the professor was suspended, not for refusing to change grading policy, but for writing a shitty, unprofessional email to a student.

249

The newspaper reported Thursday that the student asked for “a no-harm and shortened final exam” and extended deadlines for final assignments and projects – but only for black students.

This is the profesdor’s response, which got him suspended:

That got the prof suspended.

250

It certainly did include changes in grading. The student wanted a ‘no harm’ final. A No Harm final means your mark must guarantee to not lower your overall course grade, and only counts if it improves your grade. Hence the prof asking how you can have a ‘no harm’ final when the final makes up your entire grade. The student wanted the ‘no harm’ policy to apply only to black students. A ridiculous request.

251

Guess my school was just backwards. Kindergarten is 5 or 6, right? As far as I remember, that was the age when it was considered an impressive achievement to be able to count to 100. I do remember the year above me learning the 5 times table, because they recited it in front of the class and I was struck by how simple it was. But I still don’t know the times tables, and it hasn’t exactly been a handicap.

What is the 2-handed mnemonic? I’ve never heard of it.

252
  1. Can you link to the student’s request? I don’t trust the professor to represent it accurately.
  2. Your claim was false in every relevant way. It’d be helpful if you’d admit that, then we can move on.
253

To multiply two numbers which are each between 6 and 9, stick out your fingers and hold your hands toward each other with the fingers almost touching. Pretend the pinky is “6”, then all the way up through the index finger which you pretend is “9”. Touch the fingers on each hand representing the numbers you want to multiply, for instance, to multiply 7*7 touch one ring finger to the other ring finger.

Then, add up the number of fingers below or at the fingers you are touching, for 7x7 you would count your ring fingers and the pinkies for four. This is the answer for the tens position, in this case, 40. Then, count the number of fingers above this line on each hand, including the thumb, and multiply them: in this case, you still have your thumb, middle fingers, and index fingers above the line so multiply 3x3 for 9. Thus, 7x7 = 40 + 9 = 49.

254

It was? This is what I said:

How was my claim false ‘in every way’?

I linked to the story, which seems pretty clear that the prof was reprimanded (suspended) for refusing to adjust the grades on the final exam for the black students, along with other accomodations.

As for your first request, I’m sure you asked it because you know the student’s specific request is not available - it has to be inferred from the prof’s response, and from the university response to the prof. Are you suggesting that he lied about what the student wanted in an email to the student?

255

Do you have a link to the email and the request? If not then your own link seems to be supporting the professor.

256

Or, you could just know the number. When I was a kid, we were drilled with the multiplication tables up to 12 X 12, until it’s all system 1 and you just know the product. To pass, we had to undergo an oral test where we were given a bunch of multiplications up to 12 X 12 and had to answer them immediately without pencil or paper.

This frees your mind for contemplating higher level issues, without having to waste time multiplying single digit numbers.

In my opinion, if a student is still having to calculate 7*8 in a grade higher than maybe grade 3, someone has failed in teaching that kid. The value of having basic operations committed to system 1 is tremendous. It makes everything that comes after much easier, as well as day-to-day arithmetic.

One of the problems with modern education, in my opinion, is that students are passed forward in grades without mastering the stuff in the current grade. This is especially bad for math, because the knowledge builds on itself. If you keep advancing with major holes in your ability, it just feels like math gets harder and harder as the years go on, and some students come to believe that they just aren’t good at math, when in fact the school system just failed them.

This effect is much worse in poorer schools, where the gaps in learnjng are larger. There are high schools in cities like Baltimore and Chicago where only a handful of students outmof hundreds graduate with minimal proficiency in math, science, and English. I believe there are a few high schools where none of the graduating class in high school were proficient in one or more core subjects.

If this was about skin color and not economic circumstances or family issues or terrible schools, we’d see the same results among black students in good schools. We don’t. And the white kids in the terrible schools would do better. They don’t.

The idea that this is a race issue is a nice deflection away from the failed schools and failed governments in cities like Detroit, Baltimore, New York, etc.

257

In every relevant way. Your claims was that there’s “a current debate in some colleges about giving preferential grades to minorities,” and you offered this story as proof. It turns out that there’s no significant debate. The professor received a request from a student that, at worst–we don’t know what the student asked for–asked for some sort of accommodation in that moment, given the trauma of the George Floyd murder and the resulting worldwide anger at racist police violence in the US. The student appears to have suggested a variety of different remedies, only one of which, if you squint, could appear to involve adjusting grades.

The college’s grading policy forbade any adjustment of grades based on race, so there’s no debate.

The professor wasn’t, as you suggest, “reprimanded for refusing to adjust the grades for black students as the administration was demanding.” The administration not only didn’t demand any such thing, it explicitly forbade any such thing.

Instead, he was reprimanded for sending a sneering, condescending, shitty email to a student.

So, no, there’s no debate in colleges about “giving preferential grades to minorities.” That’s unmitigated nonsense.

258

Exactly. Prof. Klein, like a lot of university faculty (especially older ones), was playing the time-honored academic game called “Quibble and Sneer at Student’s Unpersuasive Request for Special Grading Leniency”.

But it’s no longer considered generally acceptable in most academic environments for faculty to do the snarkish, contemptuous quibbling and sneering directly to the student making the request. Especially in situations where the request, even if unpersuasive, involves a real-life negative situation that’s genuinely impacting students.

(On the other hand, students who submit frivolous unpersuasive requests, as in “Hey Prof, you heard that the extraterrestrials are going to invade tomorrow, right? So shouldn’t the exam be canceled?”, may still be shut down with some direct quibbling and sneering in a lighthearted way.)

When a student sticks their neck out with a policy change request due to a genuinely traumatic situation of some kind, a professor should not respond with assholish nitpicking. That doesn’t mean that the professor is in any way obligated to grant the policy change request—and, contrary to some of the right-wing media spin on the subject, nowhere have I seen any evidence that any UCLA official was advocating in any way that Prof. Klein should have granted the student’s policy change request—but it does mean that the professor should respond to the student thoughtfully and respectfully.

Save the quibble-and-sneer part for faculty coffee hour, if you really can’t resist the lure of quibbling and sneering.

259

The idea that a university student (i.e. an adult) is “genuinely traumatized” by something that happened to a stranger 2000 miles away is faintly ridiculous. You can be affected, empathetic, or enraged by it, but if you experience it as trauma then you can’t possibly go through life. And of course, political events and the victimization of people you don’t know only register as “trauma” during finals week or other times when there are grades to grub - what an unfortunate coincidence.

We devalue every concept involved when we equate political outrage with “trauma.” It trivializes the experience of actual trauma. Hearing about someone suffering injustice at the hands of police in another state is not the same thing as being raped, put into a concentration camp, run over by a car, etc. It also reduces the experience of George Floyd, a real person who was really murdered by police, to (nominally) just one of many emotional events in the story of The UCLA Undergrad Who Is the Protagonist of Reality, and (in actuality) a cynical excuse for ruthless students at a competitive school to try to gain any advantage possible in their class ranking.

In many programs, I would encourage anyone who is “traumatized” by hearing about bad things and insists on being taken at face value to reconsider their career path. Are you thinking about law school? If you can’t function when hearing about what the police did in a case that doesn’t concern you, then I do not want you defending someone whose freedom is at stake when you have to cross-examine a cop in court or accept a thousand little injustices in the process just to do your job. Med school? You need to be able to have difficult conversations with people every day, and depending on specialty you will see awful sights with regularity and be expected to continue functioning at a high level. Therapist, social worker, anything where your entire job revolves around hearing about people at their worst? Please don’t bother if this is how you react when it’s not even in front of you.

The infantilization, cynicism, and manipulation involved in reacting to everyone else’s pain by claiming it as your own and using it as an excuse to plead for special treatment and argue your way into a higher grade deserves much more than just the sarcastic tone used by Klein. He should be lauded for pushing back on it and the student should be given a much harsher reprimand.

260

You’re talking about the killing of George Floyd as though he tragically just happened to step in front of a bus or met his end in some similarly tragic but totally random and accidental fashion. Which, naturally, would not affect a remote “stranger 2000 miles away”, no matter how sad it might be for Floyd himself and his loved ones.

But, in case you haven’t heard, that’s not exactly how it went down. The killing of Floyd sparked massive national and even international outrage precisely because it shockingly illustrated a form of systemic oppressive violence that for all too many people is not at all remote or distant.

That sounds to me like a mere sanctimonious rationalization for enjoying the spectacle of an old white professor contemptuously sneering at a young black student. In real-life academia, mature adults on the faculty are expected to deal with student requests for special treatment—even the unreasonable ones—with principled and consistent firmness, but without playing armchair psychologist about the requesting student’s imagined underlying psychological processes.

This inevitably curtails some of the fun to be had with the game of “Quibble and Sneer at Student’s Unpersuasive Request for Special Grading Leniency”. But it’s better than unconvincingly trying to rationalize that game as something we’re inflicting on students “for their own good”.