Oregon Educators: Making Math Students Show Their Work Is ‘White Supremacy’

The unavoidably racist and thoroughly demeaning implication is that black students are not capable of “showing their work” or “getting the right answers,” and so teachers must lower the academic bar or remove it altogether.

There was a wonderful film in 1988 called Stand and Deliver, about a teacher in a Los Angeles Hispanic barrio school, Jaime Escalante, who inspired his students to excel in advanced mathematics. He believed in them and taught them discipline and self-confidence, and they surprised all the nay-sayers by scoring high on standardized tests.

We adopted his Spanish-inflected coaching words in our house to encourage ours to do well in school: "Ju can do it. Ju're d' best!" Oops. I guess that was racist cultural appropriation, even though it was affectionate and admiring of Escalante, and it worked.

Never mind.

“Supplement at home and leave those jackasses in the dust”

I’ve come to that conclusion...so teaching my kid relatively advanced mathematics has been fun, but can be frustrating. But it did allow him to read the basic texts from Dr. Einstein...enough to where he wanders around now trying to understand the implications of the Lorentz Contraction and the Many Worlds Interpretation.

Explaining the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper was more fun, but I told him he gets to get himself to the point of understanding the Schroedinger equation...and then get somebody to pay him to use that knowledge.

The Common Core Integrated Math trash was beyond belief. “Lashonda and Da’Quan have two dime bags each. How much did they have to pay for them?” is the level of crap that was in those “math” books. He was never taught long division either in elementary school or junior high (er, “middle school”) so when we got to polynomial division he still gets cross eyed. Can’t exactly half ass that using estimation or partial addition, now can we?

What’s really been both fun and frustrating is beating on his math teachers. They’re used to kicking the parents around and are shocked when they run up against a guy who critiques their own work - I find so many mistakes they make, I could make a career of it - and they simply don’t know how to respond.

But I actually want to just send them into orbit, because they took a kid who was doing virtually all his arithmetic in his head when he was eight (he thought writing it down was a waste of time) and dragged him into the dirt trying to make him use ridiculous methods that no one ever uses.

There’s a lot more I could say. The world of education is really the same with respect to teachers - some are amazing, others are appalling - but what seems to be different are the administrators. They’re all hyper-politicized, and that’s why it’s so bad.

So I just try to go around them. The internet and my own background allows me to do that to some extent. But why are we paying for this stupidity? As you said, what the brick and mortar schools are actually doing is babysitting the bottom half. We could cut the property taxes in half if we didn’t “need” to do that. But that ain’t gonna happen, so like I said...I know what he needs to know, and we get there with them or without. So far, that seems to work.

The public schools really are daycare with two meals. Attempts at instruction are paltry. It would be nice to stop the daycare and associated high taxes. Teach the subjects and insist that parents provide breakfast before school and send a sack lunch. It's wrong to foist the feeding of others children on the taxpayers.

I didn't push the math quite as hard with my son as you did with yours. That said, he earned degrees in Physics and Business Administration. At school, his ability to mentor his peers turned into an opportunity as a teaching assistance for physics and electronics classes.

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