Conservative Reading Comprehension

[Analytics]

Recently there was an uproar in the conservative echo chamber because the Oregon Department of Education published the following in a newsletter:

Our friends at the Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction are offering a virtual micro-course beginning February 25, 2021, titled “Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course 2.0: Valuing and elevating student discourse in the math classroom.” The course consists of five synchronous sessions.

In this online course, educators will learn key tools for engagement, develop strategies to improve equitable outcomes for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, and join communities of practice.

Now, one might wonder why conservatives would be upset about educators focusing on helping minorities do better at math. But then you remember the ones who are upset about this are racists; it makes sense that racists wouldn't want to see minorities do better at math and have the career success that leads to. According to the anti-liberal propaganda site “Daily Wire,” “The program’s toolkit also encourages teachers not to focus on a single correct answer, but to “come up with at least two answers that might solve this problem” and to “Challenge standardized test questions by getting the ‘right’ answer, but justify other answers by unpacking the assumptions that are made in the problem.” Distorted by his extreme bigotry, ajax18 imagines this means black liberals are claiming that “Anyone who argues 2+2=4 is a racist.”

Looking at the actual “Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction” material (https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/up ... TRIDE1.pdf) , you can see that the Fox News and Daily Wire articles are deliberately misleading, and that ajax18 literally could not be more wrong about this instructional material.

What the material actually says is, “Of course, most math problems have correct answers, but sometimes there can be more than one way to interpret a problem, especially word problems, leading to more than one possible right answer. And teaching math isn't just about solving specific problems. It's about helping students understand the deeper mathematical concepts so that they can apply them throughout their lives. Students can arrive at the right answer without grasping the bigger concept; or they can have an “aha” moment when they see why they got an answer wrong. Sometimes a wrong answer sheds more light than a right answer.”

On the same page as the above quote, It suggests for a classroom activity to “Choose problems that have complex, competing, or multiple answers.” In this specific context, it says to, “Come up with at least two answers that might solve this problem.” And to “Challenge standardized test questions by getting the “right” answer, but justify other answers by unpacking the assumptions that are made in the problem.”

The central theme of the material is teaching kids to think rather than simply follow rote algorithms to get the right answer to prepackaged problems. It is crystal clear that the point of this isn’t to give black kid’s A’s and participation points for saying that 2+2=5 because we don’t want to hurt their feelings. The point is to create better math students who will grow up to be better engineers and scientists. While it might be a stretch to call narrow-minded and rote mathematic instruction a manifestation of “white supremacy culture,” the actual suggestions of how to improve teaching math and make it more rigorous are spot-on.

I can’t help but imagine that the people who are upset about this are hicks who don’t have jobs in STEM fields and can’t stand the idea of blacks being more successful at math than they are. Either that, or their bigotry impedes their reading comprehension.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

What's a "join communities of practice"?

- Doc

[Jersey Girl]

Please post pics for the shut-ins. k thanks.

[Morley]

What's a "join communities of practice"?

- Doc

In K-12 education, a community of practice is a group of folks working and collaborating on theory and practice in some area they are all interested in (for example: 'How the hell are we going to teach these new math concepts?'). These days, however, there are often social justice overtones when someone uses the term.

.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

What's a "join communities of practice"?

- Doc

In K-12 education, a community of practice is a group of folks working and collaborating on theory and practice in some area they are all interested in (for example: 'How the hell are we going to teach these new math concepts?'). These days, however, there are often social justice overtones when someone uses the term.

Well. I don't really see the problem with educators trying to get people smart through sharing tips and tricks of the trade. Perhaps Conservatives simply feel like it's at the expense of White children, but I'm not sure how they would get that from OP's copypasta.

- Doc

[Morley]

Well. I don't really see the problem with educators trying to get people smart through sharing tips and tricks of the trade. Perhaps Conservatives simply feel like it's at the expense of White children, but I'm not sure how they would get that from OP's copypasta.

Neither do I. I think Analytics pretty much nailed it.

[Analytics]

My personal relationship with math has been an interesting journey. Through the 6th grade, I was squarely in the bottom third of math classes. I found memorizing multiplication and division tables to be nearly impossible, and things like fractions, long division, and decimals to be arbitrary, tedious, and difficult to consistently do correctly.

At the beginning of the 7th grade I took a placement test, and was somehow placed at the nineth(!) grade level. They moved me from the class with the dummies past the class with the average kids, all the way up to the class with the smart kids. For the next 3 or 4 years, every time I walked into a math class with the smart kids, somebody already there would say things like, "Analytics, this is geometry. This is for the smart kids. You must be in the wrong class." What was ironic about this is that although I was perceived as being dumb, I turned out to be one of the best math students in the advanced classes.

Reading about the "pathway to equitable math" reminds me of an experience I had. In the seventh grade when I was promoted to be with the smart kids, we took another placement test and there was a question that almost everybody in the class got wrong but I got right. The question was, "150% of 12 = ?" After we took the test, Mr. Carrier explained to the class the algorithm for solving this. He said, "Percent sign means you move the decimal point 2 places to the left, and 'of' means multiply. Therefore 150% of 12 means 1.5 x 12." He then set that up and did the multiplication thing with decimals and calculated 18.

All these smart kids looked at him like deer looking into headlights.

I was sitting next to Steve Brownlee, and he looked over at my paper and saw that I just wrote down the right answer without going through all that work. He whispered to me, "Hey analytics. How did you do it?" I said, "Well, 100% of 12 is 12 and 50% of 12 is 6, and 12 + 6 = 18." That totally clicked with Steve Brownlee, and being the alpha of the class he raised his hand and said, "Mr. Carrier! I like the way Analytics did it better!"

According to this "pathway to equitable math", the "white privileged" way of teaching math is to do what Mr. Carrier did--he explained that the correct way was to follow the algorithm he provided, and that we needed to show our work so that he could see that we followed to algorithm correctly. Apparently, the pathway to equitable math folks believe that white kids who speak English as a first language are better at following cookie-cutter algorithms to solve cookie-cutter math problems.

What the "pathway to equitable math" people suggest is that problems like this be looked at from multiple angles, and that the classes have conversations about different ways of approaching the same problem. This is intended not only to make math more accessible to people who struggle with cookie-cutter algorithms, but also to make the curriculum more rigorous. I don't know how anybody who knows anything about math could be anything other than fully supportive of teaching kids to think rather than teaching them how to execute cookie cutter algorithms.

Yet certain prejudiced conservatives take great offense at all this, without feeling the need to understand the details of what they are being offended at. Being prejudiced to this extent is rightly called bigotry.

[Analytics]

In K-12 education, a community of practice is a group of folks working and collaborating on theory and practice in some area they are all interested in (for example: 'How the hell are we going to teach these new math concepts?'). These days, however, there are often social justice overtones when someone uses the term.

Well. I don't really see the problem with educators trying to get people smart through sharing tips and tricks of the trade. Perhaps Conservatives simply feel like it's at the expense of White children, but I'm not sure how they would get that from OP's copypasta.

- Doc

Hey Doc,

Did you catch that this is alluding to ajax's "Liberal Math" thread? This is a response to that. But rather than providing copypasta from Daily Wire, it is looking at the actual documents that are the source of their grievance.

It's clear to me that certain conservative editorialists at Fox News and Daily Wire saw the name of this group and then scoured the documents looking for phrases they could quote out of context in order to curate hate and anger amongst their readers. That is their business model. And dimwits like ajax fall for it; just look at ajax and his BS about claiming that liberals think "2 + 2 = 4" is a racist statement.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Good timing with your post today, Analytics. I just read and watched this bit about a Black kid who only passed a handful of classes, was allowed to continue on within the curriculum, and now that he's 17 is looking at being pushed back to the 9th grade:

https://foxbaltimore.com/amp/news/proje ... th-013-gpa

If educators are identifying a greater need within the POC community for changes that actually achieve educational benchmarks I'm all for it. I get what you're saying and how it was misrepresented, but I'm not sure people like Xanax understands it's an 'us' problem when kids aren't getting the kind of schooling they need to succeed in life.

- Doc

[Analytics]

That story out of Baltimore is crazy. The kid passes 3 classes in four years of high school and has a 0.13 GPA, and with that GPA he is in the top half of his would-be graduating class? The silver lining is that his grades weren't being inflated. Apparently he earned the F's he received. Yea, the school was failing, but how could these kids and their parents be unaware that there are graduation requirements that include passing classes?

A couple months ago I saw the documentary "Waiting for Superman" which goes into a lot of details about the problems with the public school system. The basic message was that if you lived in the wrong school district, your kid's only shot at success was going to a charter school.

One of the major arguments of the movie is that in most school districts, it is basically impossible to fire a teacher who isn't good at teaching, and that teacher unions are more concerned with job security for mediocre teachers than they are with rewarding great teachers or with providing kids with the best possible education. According to the film, “ ...in Illinois, 1 in 57 doctors loses his or her medical license, and 1 in 97 attorneys loses his or her law license, but only 1 teacher in 2500 has ever lost his or her credentials.” Personally I doubt these statistics are comparable, but it does point to teaching being different than the corporate world where, for example, Jack Welch would famously rank all his employees and would routinely fire the bottom 20% of all employees every year.