WSJ: Ethnomathematics - The fusion of political correctness and relevance in Mathematics

It seems our math educators no longer believe in the beauty and power of the principles of mathematics. They are continually in search of a fix that will make it easy, relevant, fun, and even politically relevant. In the early 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued standards that disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed on a calculator. The council preferred real life problem solving, using everyday situations. Attempts to solve problems without basic skills caused some critics, especially professional mathematicians, to deride the "new, new math" as "rainforest algebra."

In a comparison of a 1973 algebra textbook and a 1998 "contemporary mathematics" textbook, Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton found a dramatic change in topics. In the 1973 book, for example, the index for the letter "F" included "factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal, finite set, formulas, fractions, and functions." In the 1998 book, the index listed "families (in poverty data), fast food nutrition data, fat in fast food, feasibility study, feeding tours, ferris wheel, fish, fishing, flags, flight, floor plan, flower beds, food, football, Ford Mustang, franchises, and fund-raising carnival."

Those were the days of innocent dumbing-down. Now mathematics is being nudged into a specifically political direction by educators who call themselves "critical theorists." They advocate using mathematics as a tool to advance social justice. Social justice math relies on political and cultural relevance to guide math instruction. One of its precepts is "ethnomathematics," that is, the belief that different cultures have evolved different ways of using mathematics, and that students will learn best if taught... mathematics... is inexorably linked with the values of the oppressors and conquerors. The culturally attuned teacher will learn about the counting system of the ancient Mayans, ancient Africans, Papua New Guineans....

"It seems terribly old-fashioned to point out that the countries that regularly beat our students in international tests of mathematics do not use the subject to steer students into political action. They teach them instead that mathematics is a universal language that is as relevant and meaningful in Tokyo as it is in Paris, Nairobi and Chicago. The students who learn this universal language well will be the builders and shapers of technology in the 21st century. The students in American classes who fall prey to the political designs of their teachers and professors will not."

-- Ms. Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution.

I have recently discovered a book that works very well in my High School Algebra and Geometry classes.

Sadly, it's a Grade 7 workbook that I bought during the days that I was teaching Junior High.

Too many students just want to know "how" so they can pass the test and don't want to know "why" so they can figure it out when they forget exactly "how" or when the problem has two steps instead of one.

And they don't believe that the learning never stops. I'm rediscovering things all the time. I find myself working things out (and actually using things like multiplying and factoring polynomials) because I want to know why some short cuts work or because I see a pattern in something or because a student give me a bizarre answer that works! (It took a while, but I figured out why it worked and when it wouldn't.)

Basically, I'd like them to just freakin' think!

A few quotes from the book limked in post #4, Rethinking Mathematics - Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers - Edited by Eric Gutstein and Bob Peterson:

As an example, consider racial profiling. This issue only becomes meaningful when viewed through a mathematical lens, whether or not the "viewer" appreciates that she or he is using mathematics. That is, it is difficult to declare that racial profiling occurs unless there is a sufficiently large data set and a way to examine that data. If, for example, 30 percent of drivers in a given area are African Americans, and the police stop six African-American drivers and four white drivers, there is weak evidence that racial profiling exists. But if police stop 612 African-American drivers and 423 whites, then there is a much stronger case. . .

The explanation lies in mathematics: In an area where only 30 percent of the drivers are black, it is virtually impossible for almost 60 percent of more than 1,000 people stopped randomly by the police to be black. . . [Or there could be just a lot more black scofflaws.]

Rethinking math also means using culturally relevant practices that build on the knowledge and experiences of students and their communities. Many of these approaches have been developed by teachers and then described and theorized by researchers of color, such as Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate. A guiding principle behind much of this work is that teachers should view students' home cultures and languages as strengths upon which to build, rather than as deficits for which to compensate. In "Race, Retrenchment, and the Reform of School Mathematics" (page 31), Tate offers the simple example of a teacher's failure to reach her students because she uses story problems that are not grounded in the students' culture; while Luis Ortiz-Franco ("Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood," page 70) encourages teachers to teach about the base-20 Mayan number system as a way to emphasize, to both Chicano students and others, that math has deep roots in indigenous cultures in the Americas. . .

While reading these articles, some people might question whether it's appropriate to interject social or political issues into mathematics. Shouldn't math teachers and curriculum, they might say, remain "neutral?"

Simply put, teaching math in a neutral manner is not possible. No math teaching — no teaching of any kind, for that matter — is actually "neutral," although some teachers may be unaware of this. As historian Howard Zinn once wrote: "In a world where justice is maldistributed, there is no such thing as a neutral or representative recapitulation of the facts."

Ping.

Excellent article and post.

The list is sufficient evidence of Misplaced Priorities.

I took the liberty of reformatting one of the paragraphs in the excerpt of Ravitch's article:

In a comparison of a 1973 algebra textbook and a 1998 "contemporary mathematics" textbook, Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton found a dramatic change in topics.

In the 1973 book, for example, the index for the letter "F" included

factors,

factoring,

fallacies,

finite decimal,

finite set,

formulas,

fractions,

and functions.

In the 1998 book, the index listed [for example, the index for the letter "F"]:

families (in poverty data)
fast food nutrition data,
fat in fast food,
feasibility study,
feeding tours,
ferris wheel,
fish, fishing,
flags, flight,
floor plan,
flower beds,
food,
football,
Ford Mustang,
franchises, and
fund-raising carnival.

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