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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
Touche!
Maybe a lot of Asian kids skipped school on the NAEP day?
What a waste of time.
I saw the list of NAEP testers one year from our school.
I knew then, just from the names, we were cooked.
I would not believe it was a random sample unless I observed the creation of the list.
Makes me wonder if the C and below students have busy parents, or just parents who don’t think their kids can improve.
Maybe – and this is doubtless treacherous territory – their kids are not going to improve regardless.
I’ve known one “Tiger Mom”. They are to be taken seriously.
So much of success in school is creating habits and discipline that clear your path, so you can pursue what you love, and endure what you don’t enjoy. There are no shortcuts, and it isn’t always a party.
Students who earn poor grades may have any number of challenges, only one of which may be their parents. A parent might be unhealthy, a weak example, abusive, downtrodden, or distracted.
Part of being a teacher is trying to discern why kids are not successful, and help them see paths beyond challenges. It is also helping students explore the strengths they have, and add to their strengths so they have choices in the future.
Those items are not on a report card, but may be the most important foundational components of school, especially for K-6 students.
Funny how part of being a teacher isn’t that different from being a parent.
Let’s cancel all H1B visas entirely. Make the Microsoft’s and Googles hire only American workers with their American schooling. See how long it takes them to figure out what the problem is and how to solve it.
We’d crash too hard, too soon. The edifice of stupidity that is the American public school system wasn’t built overnight. It will take a while to replace.
My kids started grammar school in California. When my son entered 1st grade in 1991 they had just transitioned to a new method of teaching reading that ignored phonics. Fortunately, his teacher was a year from retirement and she told us she was going to teach her class phonics and ignore the mandated curriculum. We reinforced that at home and were able to insure he was good at reading.
Right here is where we lost the Culture War.
Many of my teachers had been WW2 veterans.
How much better off would be as a nation if we had prioritized teaching jobs for Veterans instead of Draft Dodgers?
Yup. As a resident one of my colleagues ordered 0.5mg of digoxin for a patient.
He walked by the nursing station and noticed 10 little vials of digoxin on the counter.
Raced to the patients room just in time to stop the nurse giving 5 mg of digoxin.
Apparently she not only was bad at math, she must have been asleep when they explained why meds come in certain sized containers and to question any order that required an unusual number of them….
The dumber the kids the more malleable they will be to the Lefts propaganda.
Thats a feature, not a bug.
We must never forget the left’s motto:
“No idea is too crazy to implement.”
We don’t want dumb. Dumb is bad.
Wait! This may actually be a brilliant strategy to keep non-whites incapable of dealing with reality, and thus easy to subjugate and oppress. So maybe teaching non-white kids that “right” answers in math is white supremacy is a program by people who want to implement white supremacy. [The Asians present a problem for those seeking to implement white supremacy though, as Asians seem to be better at white supremacy behavior than are whites.]
Mr. Jundanian, my brilliant high school math teacher in the early 1970s used the incorrect answers in the back of the book (it was the first edition of a new textbook with lots of incorrect answers) as his own teaching tool. He immediately recognized that there were many incorrect answers in the back of the book, and so invited any of us students who thought the book’s answer was wrong to explain to the class why it was wrong, showing our work on the blackboard. Then the class would discuss. Sometimes Mr. Jundanian would jump in to ask pertinent questions, or if our discussion was going off track. We students became extra diligent in doing the homework and in making sure we understood the material, because finding and proving one of these book answer errors was good for some prestige standing among our peers.
We don’t. They do.
We had a patient death in a hospital I was working at when a nurse gave a patient 50mg of a drug instead of what the doctor ordered – 15mg.
The doctor in question was Egyptian, with a thick accent. And apparently in Egyptian culture, it is based on a strict hierarchy, and women (especially subordinate women like nurses) are not to question men in authority. Or maybe that’s his Muslim culture rather than Egyptian – I don’t really know. But he did not like being questioned by women. I heard him scream at a nurse once for questioning him about something.
Anyway, they asked me if I heard the doctor give the verbal order. I said I was on the floor that night, but I didn’t hear what he said. But it wouldn’t matter if I did, because I often couldn’t understand him.
Note that I had a good professional relationship with this guy, but I did have trouble understanding him, and his culture was clearly very different than mine when it came to women.
They dropped the investigation, to avoid the appearance of criticizing Muslims. I couldn’t blame them. This was soon after the 911 terrorist attacks, and things were politically hot. They were stuck. When I left the hospital for another job a year later, he was still on staff there. I hope he was writing more of his orders rather than using verbals, but of course I don’t know. The nurse left for another job. And I couldn’t blame her.
Crummy case.
While I have many problems with my particular union, this is one of the reasons why I would never teach in a large district like mine without one. My seniority, as well as the protection of the union, allows me the freedom to teach mathematics to my students properly, while ignoring the nonsense. The relatively paltry sum I pay in dues each year (deducted from taxes as a work expense) is more than paid for in the freedom and protection it affords me.
Who’s going to build the airplanes they take to Reykjavik to pick up their awards for fighting climate change? Who’s going to maintain the radars those planes need to fly?
If you’re going to have big, centralized school systems that treat teachers as employees rather than professionals, teachers will probably need some sort of protective organization.
My limited experience in trying to staff a small research project gave me some sympathy for those who want H1B visas increased.
I don’t know where you teach and which union represents you, NEA or AFT. In Seattle I was a member of the NEA associated Seattle Teachers Association. I paid $900/annum in dues, not a paltry sum. Negotiated contracts were handed to teachers as a block to be voted on up or down without any opportunity to vote on individual provisions. The union and district were pretty much in agreement on just about every issue, save salaries. They were pretty much indistinguishable when it came to leftist doctrines which, to a large extent, generated out of the School of Education at the University of Washington.
I had a couple of occasions where I had to rely on the union to insure my rights under the contract. One in which an administrator tried to stop me from taking a position for which I was well qualified but white. He wanted a Black teacher in that position even though there were none with my qualifications and seniority. A second involved a situation of a parent claiming that my aide’s boyfriend had molested her daughter, a charge that was eventually proven to be totally unfounded, but one in which it was nice to have the union’s attorney available for consultation.
For the rest, I had serious problems with the union failing in its requirement to segregate the dues of teachers who did not want their dues to be used for political purposes, mostly leftwing, like anti-2nd Amendment advertising. I had a problem, in general, with their using a large portion of the dues to support Democrat politicians in state and local elections. However, I do not believe that we would have achieved the salaries we did without some form of collective bargaining. When I started teaching in 1969 in New York City my starting salary for $4500/annum. After a strike during which I reported for work everyday, that figure was increased to $6500. Preparation periods and other negotiated improvements would likely not have happened without an organized union. However, like all such situations, as the balance of power shifted from the bosses to the workers, abuses of power simply shifted as well. Unions hold far too much power, and unions of government workers are inherently dangerous.
Cause or effect? If I an active in PTA, if I am at all the parent/teacher conferences, will cause my children get good grades? Or might they get good grades at least partly because I’m the type of parent that engages? And that expects his children to perform?
You can’t do that! Haven’t you heard that the economy’s global?
I’m imagining how I’d feel if I were the nurse.
The teachers want a way to avoid being held responsible for failing to teach kids what they need to know. That’s all this is. It’s a line of bovine excrement that gets them (at the children’s long term expense) off the hook for not effectively doing what we pay them to do.
You bring up a serious point. Are they really they really low I.Q. people are are they high I.Q. people whose genetic gifts have been perverted by the foolishness of man.
Eventually math will be Asian supremacist.
Also spooky: the left going after the hard sciences and how math is taught sort of reminds you of what Alexander Solzhenitsyn described in the Gulag Archipelago about Stalin going after the engineers. The point is to eliminate any field into which people can still go to make a living while either being honest publicly about their opinions or being silent on that subject. The point is to make the people who disagree with this participate in public in what they think (know) is a lie in order to keep their jobs.
Eventually math will be Asian supremacist.
True. But. It’s just got to be amusing. I can sort of see a prohibition against appropriating the concept of zero and using Arabic numerals, and the proposed replacements will be interesting to ponder. Beyond that, I’m just looking forward with anticipatory delight to see how you purge something completely abstract of anything.