Free Republic

Iowa City Community School District offers teacher trainings in “ethnomathematics” and queer “Herstory,” according to documents obtained by Parents Defending Education (PDE). “Ethnomathematics: The Study of Math as a Cultural Activity,” is the name of the teacher training session at ICCSD where “educators will approach the mathematics classroom as ethnographers, exploring the origins of our current practices and questioning the hierarchies they produce.” “Teachers do not need to pretend to be ethnographers and study math through a cultural lens,” PDE Director of Outreach Erika Sanzi said in a statement. “They need to be able to teach students the math they...

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"...

WHEN GOV. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. called multiculturalism "bunk" and "crap" about a year ago, you'd have thought, judging from the reaction of some folks, that he'd just taken out a lifetime membership in the Ku Klux Klan. ....In May 2004, state Comptroller William Donald Schaefer complained about a worker at an area fast-food restaurant who had what might be generously called insufficient English skills. Schaefer wondered why new immigrants didn't simply learn English. The next day Ehrlich expressed his support for Schaefer on a local radio station. "Once you get into this multicultural crap, this bunk that some folks...

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. 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...