Posted on 11/17/2024 3:56:36 PM PST by Fiji Hill
When you were in 4th grade frantically completing a timed multiplication test, if you were any color other than white, you were being oppressed by the pressure to get it done quickly. Were you penalized for an incorrect answer? Doubly oppressed! Was your grade lowered because your handwriting was illegible on your answers? No doubt, you are now owed reparations!
As ridiculous as this sounds, this is the current reality our black and brown public-school students are facing. Especially if their left-leaning math instructors have bought into the ridiculous ideology that “rigid” (and practical) math instruction is “white supremacist” and has been set up to “oppress” minorities. Since practically everything is “racist” now, including drinking milk and asking your students to speak proper English, why not add math instruction to the mix?
Loony Lessons
You may wonder where teachers have procured this loony idea. Unsurprisingly, the Gates Foundation is behind the push to label most traditional math instruction as white supremacist. In May of 2021, my last year teaching in public school, a free guide was published for all math teachers in California titled Dismantling Racism in Math Instruction: A Pathway to Equitable Instruction . The cover has a picture of a young black boy. The guide should be titled How to Teach Oppressed Black Kids Math or How to Dumb-Down Math So Black Kids Can Pass. I wish this were an exaggeration. The guide’s second and only other picture is of a young black girl—two visual representations of the students the guide is targeting.
As for the dumbing down, the point of the guide is to “dismantle white supremacy by making visible the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.” But what, pray tell, does the guide deem characteristics of white supremacy? It lists “perfectionism, sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, either/or thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, only one right way, progress is bigger, objectivity, right to comfort,” etc. So, of course, the guide emphasizes that getting the “right” answer in math should not be the focus; it should be understanding the concepts and reasoning. It also emphasizes making sure students learn about mathematicians of color, “particularly women of color and queers of color,” including guest lectures. Math teachers need to find the one queer black mathematician in their community to speak to their class, or their math instruction is steeped in white supremacy, apparently.
Although 80 pages, the guide only has about 10 pages of substance. The rest of the guide consists of extensive reflection questions for the teacher to evaluate how white supremacist (or not) are their math lessons. I’m almost surprised it doesn’t come with a whip for self-flagellation. I suppose repentant liberal white teachers can ease their guilty conscience by kneeling in front of the picture of a black student on the cover.
The Gates Foundation
Back to the Gates Foundation. With a quick scroll to the bottom of the website equitablemath.org, you will find that the guide and the teacher training that goes along with it are generously funded by the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation. One million dollars was given to the Education Trust West an advocacy group based in Oakland, California. The irony is that Bill Gates built his monumental wealth on computer science, a discipline entirely dependent on mathematics and one that might never have flourished if someone else had engaged in similar activism while he was growing up.
While all of this correct-answers-are-racist madness is happening, only about 26 percent of 8th-grade students are testing proficient or above in math. But why stop there? We might as well take that number to zero! Who needs a nation that is proficient in math? Who needs engineers obsessed with perfect calculations or pilots calculating the correct distance for a perfect landing? I’m sure everything will be fine when these students grow up and take their place in the workforce. Everything is being taken over by AI anyway.
Bill Gates is PURE EVIL!!!
Are they a tax exempt non-profit?
If so that needs to end.
Because maff is hard!
Racism is insisting on keeping blacks dumb. Don’t worry aho. They can handle math.
Gates goes on: "There. Don't you idiots feel better?" "I know I do...I love virtue signaling."
Then he had better take Windows off the market, since they used math to make it.
I din do nuffin! I was doing my maff!
And then the white cis male patriarchy interpreted my laziness and stupidity as being something other than completely their fault. Somehow, someway, it is Ronald Reagan’s fault.
Math is the most important subject in our schools but since whites and asians excel at it, the corporate media demands it be phased out.
The Greeks, The Arabs, the Europeans, laid the foundations for mathematics. Play by White rules, or lose. Simple.
What’s racist is claiming minorities can’t learn math!!!
Why didn’t they figure this out before I had to care about two trains traveling in opposite directions?
They want us to believe that 3 sassy black ladies were so good at math that they got us to the moon. But also, blacks are so bad at math that math must be racist.
basically, the idea is to keep the students down, especially the “ones of colour”....through ignorance and inability to use their natural talents to rise in the economy
as long as they can work at McDonalds (with pictures of each product on the cash register keys or screen since they can’t add numbers)... or work as maids or household servants for the rich “progressive” (communist/nazi) Democrapic elite,
all will be fine in Amerika.
if they are admitted based on racist recruitment and quotas into once-respected colleges, they will be authmatically passed and GIVEN degrees....and they’ll STILL be unemployable, which is the obvious intention of our Leftist Lords and Masters in this country nowadays.
Lolz. Slight correction:
"Maff be hard!"
School kid: So then I don’t gotta take no more math quizzes? I never learned nothing I can use later in life.
I want to pursue my journalism career.
Just imagine a Klansman in full hooded regalia stating that [derogatory epithet for blacks] cannot do math because by their nature they are imperfect, have no urgency, have no respect for the written word and have no objectivity. Now explain how Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation are not as racist as the Grand Wizard of the Klan.
In pilot training, if the IP lets a T-38 student go 10 knots low in the final turn, they’d better know how to eject quickly. Some of us taught real standards. Those that didn’t are no longer around. The article reminds us that the only standards for the left are double (or triple, or more) standards.
How much math do you need to be a professional athelete?
Count to keep score. Don’t get over 11 men on the field. Run the 40 in 4.5. Subtract from 10 yards to get first down.
Oh, and count salary by the millions.
Keep ‘em ignorant, keep ‘em poor.
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