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The White Supremacy of Arithmetic
From a recent FoxNews story: “The Oregon Department of Education recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages ‘ethnomathematics’ and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.”
Now, as a conservative, I don’t pretend to understand this. But to my untrained ear, it certainly sounds like leftist teachers think that being white is equivalent to being correct. Although perhaps I misunderstand, because again, to a conservative this makes no sense.
Part of the “Equitable Math” toolkit explains that, “the belief that there is such a thing as being objective or ‘neutral’” is a characteristic of White supremacy. It expands on this point, “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.” And it instructs teachers to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”
Remember, this is middle school math. How are you supposed to teach math to 13-year-olds without perpetuating objectivity? How does long division uphold racist views? How is finding the right answer related to white supremacy? I’m fairly certain that this is not satire. I think they’re serious. And these people teach our children.
This isn’t even sociology, which is essentially the study of the absurd. No. This is middle school math.
When my dad went to college in the ’60s, he said a lot of his professors and coaches were WWII veterans who went to graduate school on the GI bill after the war. They were not flower children, as you might imagine.
When I was in grade school in the ’70s, some of my teachers were men who stayed in college and got their teaching certificate, then agreed to teach in underserved areas like mine to avoid the Vietnam draft. They were a bit different than the hard-boiled typed my Dad described. This, I think, is when it really started.
Since then, our educational system has moved gradually but steadily left. Each little step seemed relatively unimportant, and anyone who argued was understandably criticized for making a big deal out of nothing.
And eventually, 50 years later, here we are. Training middle school math teachers on the white supremacy of arithmetic.
How do we get back to reality? So many little things have changed. So many little things. I’m not sure how to fix all this.
But I’m sure of this: Our public schools cannot be fixed. They’re too far gone. We need to start over.
The teachers’ unions, the Democratic Party, the media, and many other powerful organizations will make this a difficult and messy process. But it must be done. And the longer we wait, the more difficult and messy it will be.
Meanwhile, our 13-year-olds are learning about the white supremacy of arithmetic.
We need to get started.
Published in General
But then you couldn’t call it ethnomathematics and you lose your sales hook. You aren’t trying to sell this to Euclid or Euler. Your targets are woke educators who had to cram for remedial math.
There’s reasons Mrs. Augustine and I prefer homeschooling.
This particular comment underscores the horror I felt when booted from the women’s group I had been part of for over 6 years.
What was my failing? Did I fail to host meetings at my home? Fail to bring the required baked goods to the meetings?
My failure: I stated that although I had reservations about the newly elected President Trump, I was enthused about his decision to push for an infra structure program for America.
That comment was immediately brandished as being part of the White Supremacist lexicon, and I was forthwith uninvited to future women hoopla’s.
So it is my personal experience at least, that yes, bridges are part of White Supremacism, an ugly pustule we must wipe out no matter how many lives are lost on or under collapsing bridges.
You have no idea. My wife so often has to correct me on so many things. But I have made it to 75 without going down any one way streets the wrong way.
Barack Obama had an infrastructure plan too, so …
I disagree, quite strongly.
The idea that we’re going to teach minority kids mathematics by teaching them not to focus on getting the right answer is just absurd.
I don’t think that this is about teaching. I think that it is about invalidating the field of mathematics, because certain minority groups perform so poorly in the field.
The Equalitarian hypothesis is that everyone has the same abilities. This is false. The Ethnic Equalitarian hypothesis is that even if individuals differ, every racial or ethnic group has the same abilities. This, too, is false.
You can see the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress here. These are the figures for the percent of 12th grade students who are proficient in math, by racial or ethnic group, in 2019 (the last reported year):
Here’s how Wokeism works. The subject of mathematics is White Supremacist because whites do better than blacks.
But don’t worry! We’ll just do away with the idea that there’s a right answer, and everyone will be equal!
This is quite depressing.
Precisely! In effect they’re saying, “We no longer care about equal opportunity; we want equal (if not superior) outcomes. Logic? Mathmatical reasoning? It’s just too hard! So, we’re moving the goalposts any way that we d*mn well please and if you object then you’ll be labeled a “white supremacist” and there’s nothing you can do about it because the media is 100% behind us.”
(P.S. The media can’t do math either…)
Uh, you might want to qualify that a bit…There were a number of folks who went to Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East who had some serious consequences.
If this doesn’t scare parents into pulling their kids out of public schools, nothing will.
<sarcasm>This was rattling in my White Supremacist brain.</sarcasm>
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/279036-i-m-sorry-to-say-that-the-subject-i-most-disliked
This would mean the teacher would have to understand that. You might think that a math teacher would know how to do math. This turns out not always to be the case. When my son first encountered algebra in middle school, he came to me with a homework problem marked incorrect. He didn’t understand what he did wrong. Turns out he didn’t do anything wrong; the answer in the back of the book was incorrect. (I wonder if math textbook publishers deliberately put randomly selected incorrect answers in their books for copyright protection purposes the way encyclopedia publishers included false articles to prove copy violations by competitors.)
I met with his teacher (later) to discuss it. She didn’t understand that the book answers could be wrong and couldn’t work the problem to get the book answer either. In fact, she did not understand how to factor an equation. It turns out she had never taught algebra before; she may have never taken algebra in college. She was trying to stay ahead of the class using an instruction guide, saying the “right” things and giving assignments and grading homework and tests per the official answers.
I made it a teaching moment for my son on how to coexist with teachers who don’t know their subjects. Knowing that what teachers claim is not necessarily true is a valuable lesson.
What I learned (or had reaffirmed) is that Schools of Education do not teach that a Teacher needs to understand their subject. Instruction skills obviate the need.
It always amazed me in the years I taught that none of the kids I worked with came to me with the ability to do either simple multiplication or long division. Most did not know their multiplication tables. Somewhere along the way elementary teachers had stopped teaching those basic skills. Drill was not considered to be an acceptable form of teaching.
I am old school. I went to private schools throughout my education in primary and secondary schools. The first public school I set foot in was during my training as a part of the Intensive Teacher Training Program in the New York City Schools in 1967. I had just completed two masters degrees in Marine Science and Classical Theater and had no idea as to what I was going to do for a living. I didn’t want to go into my father’s business, theatrical photography, and I didn’t want to continue as a career officer in the US Navy. Teaching appealed to me because I had had some wonderful, inspiring teachers in my years in school. I loved learning for it own sake, and hoped to be able to pass along that love to children. The ITTP offered me a way to get into teaching without having to go through a school of education. When I completed the course over the summer of 1967 I was placed in PS 28 K in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, perhaps the worst hellhole in the New York City school system. In my two years in that school I developed a system for teaching arithmetic basic skills that I used for more than 40 years in my various assignments. Even though I had begun in an elementary, I found that there was little difference in what I was doing through those years when teaching middle school and high school students, very few of whom had learned basic arithmetic facts in their previous classes.
Learning basic facts takes drill. It isn’t fun, but it is essential. At some point teachers in elementary schools stopped doing things that weren’t fun, and tried to make “education” a fun thing. Teachers had to have a “motivation” as part of their lesson plan. Simply learning facts wasn’t sufficient. Creating the discipline in children that allowed them to progress meaningfully was not seen as a goal. Teachers who were trained in the new style didn’t do that. I did. As a consequence, my students learned to multiply, do long division, work with fractions, and all of the algorithms I learned as an elementary school student before learning Algebra and Geometry in high school. It wasn’t easy for them or me. We drilled over and over again until they were competent. That’s what it takes. Most of them were Black and from poor families. Even though the schools didn’t think that they needed to be drilled in basic facts, they knew and I knew that they did.
You know, to be fair, it’s not unreasonable to say that the right answer is not the most important thing.
That is, it’s not unreasonable to say that the process by which one finds the right answer is more important than getting the right answer on some particular question.
And, of course, all kinds of white people have said that too. And non-white people. I don’t notice any connection to race in this issue at all.
Exactly so.
Jaime Escalante was unavailable for comment. Perhaps his students, now of an age to lead their communities and states, should speak out, loudly.
But guess who is #1 when asked “Do you think you are good at mathematics?”
US students are full of unjustified confidence.
It might scare some parents; those who care. As for the rest, it’s tough to scare a larda&& sitting on a couch and watching soap operas all day long.
I have a number of teachers in my family (public schools) and they tell me that for every parent/teacher conference they know exactly who will be there; the parents of the “A” and “B” students. The parents of the rest of the kids simply don’t give a flip.
And our Uniparty GOP was right there to remove any caps on these visas.
Math is comprised of methods of finding answers which can be done in a number of ways. I had Vietnamese aide during one summer school session who taught me some completely amazing algorithms for finding answers. The thing was that using her technique or mine we reached the same answer because it was based on facts, like 1×1=1 and 7×8=56. Math is not relative. It is absolute. It doesn’t depend on the color of your skin or your ethnicity. That is one of the wonderful things about math. That is one of the things that leftist hate about math, it isn’t relative, it is absolute.
The correct answer is the answer dictated by the Party.
My father was a chemist and engineer. After the Ribbentrop Molotov pact the part of Romania he was in was annexed by the USSR. My father was a Ukrainian patriot, so had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand the territory was now part of Ukraine. On the other it was Soviet and he despised communism.
He got a job working as an engineer. He was given an assignment to design an electric motor. When he looked at the required specifications of the motor, he went to his boss and told him it was impossible. There was no way to design a motor to those specs.
He was accused of being a ” wrecker” and anti Soviet. He was destined for Siberia or execution.
The only thing that saved him was the German invasion of the USSR. He pent the rest of the war trying desperately to keep from being ‘liberated” by the USSR. The war ended with him and my mom and sisters a few kilometers in the US occupation zone in Austria. Later , the US wanted to send all the DP’s ‘”home to the USSR”. They were horrified when entire families committed suicide to avoid this.
Very old news- google “mathematically correct” for the 1st iteration of this
http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com
Back in the 90s a group in California rose to fight “rainforest algebra”. Their story is very instructive. An algebra text they cited was over 800 pages with no algebra in it for the 1st 100 plus pages(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addison-Wesley_Secondary_Math:_An_Integrated_Approach:_Focus_on_Algebra)
it got so bad that when California was rewriting their math standards a group of (IIRC) Cal Tech, Stanford and Jet Propulsion Lab PhDs offered to write them free of charge but were rejected in favor of an Ed school- b/c the politically motivated board doubted the expertise of the JPL staff- which included Nobel laureates in math and Chemistry!
for more read Math Wars:
https://web.archive.org/web/20111123232100/http://www.csun.edu/%7evcmth00m/bshm.html
It can’t be emphasized too much how important this is, and how many barriers have been put in the way of this approach.
Dr. Bastiat, I graduated from high school in 1963. I was kind of surprised at how many of my fellow (male) graduates were going to schools of education. They hadn’t shown any particular affinity for the subject, and mostly were not terribly good students.
Then I found out that being a teacher was a guaranteed draft dodge.
Then I noticed that (in my home state) the cadre of draft dodgers became the cadre of organizing teachers unions.
Now that state is going broke paying the retirement benefits of that cadre.
A clean sweep.
And helps build cars, solar panels, windmills,
By all means teach stupid math.
People who can escape, will. Hopefully the remainder will be rescued.
Can I say remainder? I think that might be an un-woke math word.
The left is in the process of imploding. Never interrupt your enemy while he’s destroying himself.
I know, right answer.
Ask a nurse giving meds about math and getting the right answer.
You can’t miss a decimal point in a calculation without wreaking havoc or death!
Yeah, but they are going to take a lot of little kids with them.
Well, I’m depressed Aisians were at 52%. I expected a better result.
I know. I know. I spent my early teaching years in an urban school. I cried a lot when I left.
Alas, I fear I’d be unwelcome loving and teaching those kids now, what with my fair skin.
Funny, that skin pigment was the ONLY thing we didn’t share. The rest of the saga and challenge of urban life was quite familiar to me.
We’ll see. I may end up ending my teaching life the way it began. If they’ll have me.
So did their moms.