What would "social justice math" look like? Serious question, I can't even imagine. Here in Europe math education hasn't changed a ton in the past decades at all.
Presumably things like California's proposed new math standards documents[1]. In chapter 7 (for 11-13 year olds) there are examples like this:
> BLUE Family: 2 adults; 2 children You are a Latinx family with two children under the age of five. Mom stays home to take care of the children. Dad works 40 hours per week at a construction company that pays two times minimum wage for nontipped employees.
> YELLOW Family: 1 adult You are a young, single Black woman who is going to school part time and working full time (40 hours per week). You work at the same construction company as the dad of the BLUE family, but most Black women (including you) make 64 percent of what men at the company make.
i.e. the government encouraging flamebaiting over race/sex. The example goes on to have children conclude the minimum wage is unfair and encourage them to write letters to their representatives about raising it based a comparison of wages to cost of rentals in Chicago.
Mind you, when this proposal was making the rounds a couple years ago, I looked up rentals in Chicago and found plenty at a fraction of the quoted numbers for the exercise, but the point of the exercise is to teach children the virtues of activism, not to teach them to use math to understand their world.
It’s an effort by teachers unions to use their presence in schools to socialize minority children into viewing themselves as victims of pervasive racism and to cultivate activist leanings that will lead them to vote democrat (the party tightly aligned with teachers unions): https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-throu...
The rallying cry seems to be that "2+2=4 is racist".
Expanded a bit, it seems to be that insisting that some answers are "wrong" disregards students' differing backgrounds and diverse avenues to solve problems.
Which is distilled down to "teachers teach math in a way that is topical to the current environment, such as BLM protests which is really nothing new. You might disagree with it, sure, but to say that this is "the wokes" teaching 2+2=fish, that's frankly ridiculous.
In fact, the only thing I can find reporting on "2+2=racist" is this Washington Examiner article deriding a math teacher from NYC for her tweets (article here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/math-professor-claim...) which sounds _awful_ but it's a single person tweeting, and it seems to be in relation to using "math is pure and objective so it always must be neutral" as a defense for situations where data/statistics/algorithms presented show a clear bias. Which I think generally is an agreed upon phenomenon-- depending on the sampling and interpretation of the data, folks can come to _wildly_ different conclusions, especially if data was accidentally omitted.
> For one-to-one matching, the team saw higher rates of false positives for Asian and African American faces relative to images of Caucasians. The differentials often ranged from a factor of 10 to 100 times, depending on the individual algorithm. False positives might present a security concern to the system owner, as they may allow access to impostors.
...
> However, a notable exception was for some algorithms developed in Asian countries. There was no such dramatic difference in false positives in one-to-one matching between Asian and Caucasian faces for algorithms developed in Asia. While Grother reiterated that the NIST study does not explore the relationship between cause and effect, one possible connection, and area for research, is the relationship between an algorithm’s performance and the data used to train it. “These results are an encouraging sign that more diverse training data may produce more equitable outcomes, should it be possible for developers to use such data,” he said.
All the other sources I found on google were either think tanks, facebook posts, or spam sites.
ETA: even in the most pessimistic reading of those tweets, I'm personally hard pressed to find that one person tweeting means that all math teachers everywhere are trying to take math down to "2+2=racist"
I'd have to agree with OP, it does seem to be bad faith, because the entire time, instead of discussing the proposed changes at face value, they seem to try and ridicule it as if someone says that 2+2=4 is racist, yet they don't quote anyone actually saying that or anything.
I've read the whole article you linked, and I'm no smarter in understanding what the problem is, and the suggested changes are which they're making fun of.
I apologize, that was a knee jerk reaction because I've never seen the assertion that 2+2=4 is racist before, only that math can be used inaccurately (purposefully or by accident) in racial contexts. I was a bit taken aback by the assertion and should have engaged differently.
> Funny how you build up a straw man. I never claimed any of that.
This isn't a straw man, I'm not building up some contrived argument here; the original comment was that "2+2=4 is racist" is a rallying cry for [some not insignificant number of math teachers].
> For example the Wall Street Journal. And hundreds of similar articles.
I did find this Opinion while googling, and read the parent Op-Ed (https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-leftists-try-to-canc...) and then followed through to the framework but I just don't see anything about the manual they were talking about in that Op-Ed in the works cited (seems like all references to the manual have since been removed). So I dug up the wayback machine on the page to see the context in which they were using the "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction" manual.
> A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction (https://equitablemath.org/) is an integrated approach to mathematics that centers Black, Latinx, and linguistically diverse students in grades 6–8, addresses barriers to mathematics equity, and aligns instruction to grade-level priority standards. The Pathway offers guidance and resources for immediate use in planning their curriculum, while also offering opportunities for ongoing self-reflection as they seek to develop an anti-racist mathematics practice. The toolkit “strides” (above) serve as multiple on-ramps for educators as they navigate the individual and collective journey from equity to anti-racism. It is a collection of resources to help grades 6–8 Black, LatinX, and linguistically diverse students thrive in mathematics education.
Ok so generally seems like they're recommending the usage in primarily POC or mixed classrooms where the considerations for teaching might be a bit different due to a multitude of factors.
• Teach rich, thoughtful, complex mathematics.
• Teach rigorous mathematics, understanding that rigor is characterized as thorough, exhaustive, and
interdisciplinary.
• Use mistakes as opportunities for learning.
• Recognize mistakes as miscommunicated knowledge.
• Allow for engagement in productive struggle
• Teach students of color about the career and financial opportunities in math and STEM fields.
• Encourage them to disrupt the disproportionate push-out of people of color in those fields.
• Invite leaders and innovators of color working in STEAM fields to meet your students.
• Rely on teamwork and collaboration as much as possible.
• Teach mathematics through project-based learning and other engaging approaches.
• Provide multiple opportunities for students to learn from and teach each other.
• Intentionally include mathematicians of color.
• Expose students to mathematicians of color, particularly women of color and queer mathematicians of color, both
through historical examples and by inviting community guest speakers.
• Teach students of color about their mathematical legacy and ancestral connection and mastery of math.
• Honor and acknowledge the mathematical knowledge of students of color, even if it shows up unconventionally.
• Give rightful credit to the discovery of math concepts by mathematicians of color. Reclaim concepts attributed to
white mathematicians that should be attributed to mathematicians of color.
Which all seems fairly reasonable here to my eyes. I will 100% agree with any assertions that the titles are very standoffish and even straight up accusatory but the content of the manual really seems like something good teachers should strive for. So to conclude I don't think that 2+2=4 is racist is really a rallying cry, the literature cited everywhere seems to talk mainly towards the teaching methodologies employed.
All of these things take away the very limited classroom time that should be spent on skills rather than non math topics. She would regularly bemoan lost days, because at the end of the year the kids had to take a math test, not a history of math test.
All of this stuff has nothing to do with math, and doesn't actually help them learn math skills. Students of color aren't struggling with math because they don't have role models in the field. It's a universal language. They struggled with math due to lack of literal time spent studying, practicing, and drilling these concepts. They struggle because someone white tells them that they need role models in the field instead of simply letting them be capable and giving them the tools to learn.
And as someone of color, when you constantly push it in my face that I'm underrepresented, that math is primarily for white people, which you ultimately are doing by trying to bring race into everything, it then gives me an excuse for failure. It simply feeds into the victim mentality and kids will give up before they begin. Success is born from work, not hero worship. When you are inspired by someone, if you find inspiration from the color of their skin, and not the actual blood, sweat, and years they put into success, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Looking at the opportunities available to you from the lens of race is like shooting yourself in the foot. If I had done that- I would have assumed that my most likely path to success was going to be with a ball in my hands. And if I don't see a black man in a specific field...then how could I ever be successful in that field myself?
The vast majority of this does not belong in a math classroom. Math classrooms do not primarily cover the history or sociology of mathematics; they cover (or, at least, should cover) how to do algebra.
Perhaps those things could enrich curricula once students were actually being taught math, but schools fail at that. And some districts (e.g. SFUSD) have taken to banning the teaching of algebra in middle school because it's "inequitable."
Many students aren't going to learn by rote memorization of completing homework. It it helpful to support different learning styles.
A big problem with math education is that it's too abstract. It's hard to relate mathematical concepts to real life. "When are we going to use this?", people ask. Phrasing your questions in terms of real problems with a narrative can help students learn.
Homework usually isn't rote learning (unless we're talking foreign language vocabulary – and there rote learning is important!), but practice.
Students get to practice what the teacher (tried to) showed them with different problems, so both they and the teacher can see if they mastered the topic.
IIRC most of the evidence shows homework isn’t very useful for learning.
(And, unfortunately, that almost no skills generally transfer over to other skills, ie that practicing math doesn’t improve anything other than that specific math.)
What about algebra? Which I consider the field of math that actually carries over to many many other things. Like physics and chemistry. And certain skill level in it is required to be able manipulate expressions in other fields.
