Posted on 09/16/2014 5:02:58 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
According to a Teach for America website, culturally responsive teaching in math is important because “math has traditionally been seen as the domain of old, White men.”
white privilege and prejudiceAs reported earlier this week, Teach for America groups across the country are committing themselves to “culturally responsive teaching,” a radical pedagogy used by communist Bill Ayers and other blatant anti-American indoctrinators.
The site, Culturally Responsive Teaching, Teach for America, says that because math is seen as a domain for old, white men, many students cannot identify with it. Therefore, educators should find ways to relate math to the lives of their students.
Judging from the math curriculum recommended, this TFA group, like all other social justice educators, wants minorities to believe that what relates most to their lives in America is racism and oppression.
For example, the site recommends “Critically Conscious Mathematics” and “Radical Math.”
Radical Math was created by educator Jonathan Osler several years ago while teaching at El Puenta Academy in New Jersey. Osler taught Radical Math along-side Cathy Wilkerson, a former member of the Weather Underground Organization (with Bill Ayers) who once participated in a plot to detonate a nail bomb at a dance for military personnel at Fort Dix.
Radical Math provides hundreds of social justice math lessons obviously meant to indoctrinate. For example, lesson titles include “Sweatshop Accounting,” “Racism and Stop and Frisk,” “When Equal Isn’t Fair,” “The Square Root of a Fair Share” and “Home Buying While Brown or Black.”
Today, Osler is director of the San Francisco Teacher Residency, a teacher training and job placement program created by the San Francisco Unified School District and Common Core assessment creator and validation committee member, Linda Darling-Hammond.
Astonishingly, in proudly promoting ‘cultural competence’ and ‘critical consciousness’ in education, the TFA website’s home page links to a Wikipedia definition of critical consciousness that describes it as a concept developed by Paulo Freire and grounded in post-Marxist critical theory.
As recently reported, the site also contains letters from 5th grade students asking text publisher Houghton Mifflin why they did not include in their textbook the fact that Christopher Columbus ‘burned, slayed and hanged’ Native Americans who would not find gold for him.
In keeping with their racism-of-evil-white-men theme, the site uses a story, involving racism against African Americans, of course, to suggest that the idea that math is neutral, rational, and logical is a myth and the premise that 2 + 2 = 4 is “naive.”
Here’s the story:
… a European explorer (presumably Francis Galton, the man who invented eugenics) agrees to trade an African shepherd two sticks of tobacco in exchange for one sheep. When he offers four sticks of tobacco in exchange for two sheep, however, the shepherd declines; the explorer later tells this story as evidence of the shepherd’s inability to comprehend simple mathematical reasoning and as “proof” of intellectual inferiority on the African subcontinent. But, if sheep are not standardized units, as there is no reason to believe them to be, then doesn’t it make sense that the second sheep might be worth far more than the first? And then doesn’t our premise of 2 + 2 = 4 look awfully naive?
If Teach for America, as a whole, does not agree with the content of this particular website that bears its name, now would be a good time to say so. Although TFA’s reputation has not been stellar as of late, the ideals and methods expressed in this particular website are beyond fringe, not to mention senseless.
Dumb sh!ts! You are not supposed to identify with math, you are supposed to learn it.
All that I know is that the scores of my students consistently outperform those of other teachers in my school and those of other schools in my district. I teach the way that I was taught. Granted, there are some technology pieces that are quite useful that weren’t around 30 years ago, but the fact remains if you do not know how and when to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. ...with fluency, no amount of movement or gadgets or ethnic names in the word problems (don’t get me started on that!) will ever prepare students for the real world.
I just watched the whole thing. It was great. Sickening to see where we have gone as a country.
No kidding, it’s a travesty.
DIVERSION
...and BRILLIANT. The idea is to THROW US OFF. The libs do not care about “old white men”. Instead they care ONLY about “white men” of any age.
It took me DECADES to finally figure out that the ENTIRE PURPOSE of the way math is taught today in public schools (and, unfortunately, many private schools) is to assure that white boys FAIL. And the results have been OUTSTANDING...nearly a PERFECT RECORD, with the only exception being parents that are on to it, and WILL NOT permit it.
So, FINE, keep sticking your kids on that big yellow bus, but DO NOT blame me when they end up as TOTAL SLUGS...for I warned you.
(and yes, I know, I’m just a kook...but my kids are making well over $100k in their 20s, and ONLY because I kept them clear of the above...so good luck counting on that bunch for your kids)
Math is the domain of old white men.
So is money.
Duh.
Their negative thought currents are a blight on society.
Word problem: If a white man can’t jump, how high can an old white man jump?
... Well, close. Here's the Italian, which can easily be followed if one has a transalation in hand, and I include it just to emphasize that he does not mention or allude to God, except insofar as one my infer that the passive form of "written" implies it.
La filosofia è scritta in questo grandissimo libro che continuamente ci sta aperto innanzi a gli occhi (io dico l'universo), ma non si può intendere se prima non s'impara a intender la lingua, e conoscer i caratteri, ne' quali è scritto. Egli è scritto in lingua matematica, e i caratteri son triangoli, cerchi, ed altre figure geometriche, senza i quali mezi è impossibile a intenderne umanamente parola; senza questi è un aggirarsi vanamente per un oscuro laberinto.
Here's the Google translation, which I altered only very slightly where indicated by brackets:
Philosophy is written in this grand book which stands continually open to our eyes (I mean the universe), but can not be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and know the characters [ in which it ] is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which [ means it ] is humanly impossible to understand a word; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.
hahah, Bree-Anda, haha.
“Math has traditionally been seen as the domain of old, White men,” said the old white communists.
Without math his ya gonna know the balance on your ebt card?
I gave even a teacher I liked in high school nothing but fits about math. It was only in my mid-fifties that I really got into number theory. Andrew Wiles proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem is what really did the trick.
i liked geometry, trig, physics and even statistics, but hate algebra
Physics is the key to the universe in that God derived the function we discovered as mathematics.
Gauss! Of course, all of these displayed brilliance at a young age.
I think "old white men" is an echo of DWEMs, Dead White European Males, spoken of in the musings of Postmodernism, not very long ago.
She likes algebra, but she doesn’t like geometry.
She likes physics, but she doesn’t like statistics.
She likes coffee, but she doesn’t like tea.
Was not until I got up to vector calculus that I started to get feelings of inadequacy. But luckily, I had no plans for a Phd in engineering. Knew my gifts were in hardware, not theory.
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