Conservative Reading Comprehension

[Analytics]

They should be criticized for injecting race and crying racism about something that is completely race neutral.

The way math is taught is not completely race neutral.

It's really a mental disorder. Everything has to be about white supremacism for these people.

Actually, with these people it is about how best to teach math to heterogenous students. Your obsession with race and proclivity to project is noted.

Did you call out the professor's white supremacy for marking these answers wrong that weren't wrong?

Nope, lol.

You might get away with that in undergraduate school. I had a friend similarly question a professor about question in optometry school. The professor admitted to another student how he keyed the exam. The professor responded to my friend by accusing him of stealing an exam and trying to get him kicked out of school. Even medical school is not hard science and is very political. If my friend were black you'd probably have heard about this 24/7 on CNN as an example of white supremacy in education. In reality it was just a professor who didn't want to be challenged or questioned on how he keyed the exam and had nothing to do with racism or white supremacy. If the professor says the sky is red. Then the sky is red. That's how it works at that level...

And this example somehow means that it is wrong for teachers to voluntarily sign up to take a course on how to be better math teachers? Or does it mean that it is wrong for teachers to try to reflect on their own biases?

[Moksha]

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz) delivered the keynote address at America First Political Action Conference, the second annual gathering of the white nationalist “groyper” movement. Republicans don't care. They learned under Trump that being racist/fascist is a vote-getter.

[ajax18]

The way math is taught is not completely race neutral.

Why do blacks require a different method of teaching than whites?

Why does looking at different ways to solve a math problem (which is fundamentally important as you rightly pointed out) have anything to do with the race of the student?

[Chap]

Why do blacks require a different method of teaching than whites?

If a teacher finds that their black students require them to adopt different teaching strategies than with white students, I would surmise that this is not because having African ancestors in itself makes students less able to assimilate maths teaching than students with European or East Asian ancestors.

It will be because they belong to a group that they know to be historically poorly regarded, despised and even hated by many non-black people in their society, and that they can see faces major barriers in career progression compared to non-blacks, and to be targeted with the semi-automatic suspicion of law enforcement and other social authorities. Failing is what they are expected to do, and they know it.

Failure to correctly understand and solve a math problem? Oh Lord, here we go again, me doing what they expect me to do - mess up. Can't do math, won't do math. So with such students, you need to lead them to success in (say) solving quadratics with complex roots by a series of baby steps in all or most of which they succeed and for which they are given positive reinforcement. You make them feel that what they think matters, and that they have something interesting to contribute to the class. In they end, they not only learn to solve quadratics, they even begin to see themselves differently.

Or something like that. But what do I know?

[canpakes]

They should be criticized for injecting race and crying racism about something that is completely race neutral.

The way math is taught is not completely race neutral.

It's really a mental disorder. Everything has to be about white supremacism for these people.

Actually, with these people it is about how best to teach math to heterogenous students. Your obsession with race and proclivity to project is noted.

Although crudely expressed, I understand where ajax is going with this. From the document itself, we have the following excerpt within the first few pages:

“... critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture ...”

This seems both somewhat inaccurate and inappropriate. I’d argue that it would have been more realistic and far less unnecessarily emotionally charged to refer to the prevailing teaching approaches as, say, Eurocentric or western-centric, which would have accurately portrayed the potential problem without injecting the problematic accusation inherent in the document’s phrasing. Instead, the wording carries the baggage of malicious intent, whether the authors intended them to do so, or not. I can’t get on board with the implication that all instructors - given that this has been the default method available to them as mandated by their textbooks and districts - should be yoked with the claim of promoting supremacist intent for that lack of options*. As well, I don’t imagine that incorporating teaching methodologies that might be more familiar or workable for folks from (as example) Native American culture would then render that style of teaching as ‘Native American Supremacist’, nor would I reference the added cultural options as ‘toxic’.

I’d also assume that some of the proposed teaching changes could just as easily benefit white students who are otherwise experiencing difficulty grasping the standard approaches. That would help those kids also succeed. Would doing so be aiding white supremacy culture? ; )

To that last point, here’s where I see ajax limiting his vision:

Why do blacks require a different method of teaching than whites?

Why does looking at different ways to solve a math problem (which is fundamentally important as you rightly pointed out) have anything to do with the race of the student?

How one learns is directly affected by the culture that they’ve grown within. While mathematics itself isn’t ‘racist’, the teaching methods associated with it can be culturally limited. It makes all the sense in the world to use the advantages afforded by multiculturally-influenced teaching options in order to give students the best chance to succeed.

Linked below is a paper from a few years back that speaks to this in a bit more detail, where aboriginal cultural considerations were incorporated into teaching methods.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1246776.pdf

*my SO and I always joke about our ADD tendencies so maybe I’m just digesting that terminology too literally. But why set this up in that way as to suggest this interpretation?

[ajax18]

Failure to correctly understand and solve a math problem? Oh Lord, here we go again, me doing what they expect me to do - mess up. Can't do math, won't do math. So with such students, you need to lead them to success in (say) solving quadratics with complex roots by a series of baby steps in all or most of which they succeed and for which they are given positive reinforcement. You make them feel that what they think matters, and that they have something interesting to contribute to the class. In they end, they not only learn to solve quadratics, they even begin to see themselves differently.

It seems like this and what Analytics was describing would work for white kids as well. Do blacks really need a separate method of education than whites?

[canpakes]

It seems like this and what Analytics was describing would work for white kids as well. Do blacks really need a separate method of education than whites?

Is it separate? Or is it just that the traditional teaching methods are augmented with new choices?

It’s not like teachers are going to usher the black kids out into a separate area to use a particular method on them exclusively. Or that white kids can’t grasp alternative methods and are subsequently disadvantaged. Instead, all students will get the new options.

Are you wanting to characterize more varied teaching approaches for all as a negative outcome?

[Analytics]

It seems like this and what Analytics was describing would work for white kids as well. Do blacks really need a separate method of education than whites?

Reiterating what canpakes said, nobody is arguing that blacks need a separate method of education than whites. What is being argued is that certain inferior methods of education have a tendency to harm black kids even more than they harm white kids. The course is intended to help math teachers be better math teachers for all students.

[Morley]

Yeah, it's pretty hard to fire teachers, though that's not as much the fault of unions as it is the culture that surrounds education. Teaching is a fairly low-pay, low-prestige job that is still seen has having good benefits and solid job security. Districts and administrators are loath to mess with either of those....

I'd be really interested in your reaction to "Waiting for Superman." The basic premise of the film was that kids perform better at charter schools because charter schools have better teachers, and that charter schools have better teachers because the charter schools are free to reward good teachers and get rid of bad ones.

One of the heroes of the movie was Michelle Rhee, who was hired to clean up the Washington DC school district. Her big plan was to renegotiate the contracts with teachers. As I recall, her offer was to give all teachers a raise, and to have higher pay for really good teachers, so that if you were a truly excellent teacher you could make something like $130k a year. In exchange for this, the district would be given significantly more freedom to fire bad teachers.

I certainly don't want to pretend to be an expert on the topic for having spent 2 hours watching a documentary, but the movie was really interesting and painted a compelling picture.

I've haven't seen the documentary, but by all accounts it's very well done for what it is. I did read the book that, I think, was to accompany the documentary (a decade ago?). If I remember, it presented a somewhat incomplete set of data, notable for what it left out as much as what it included. The actual research on charter school efficacy is a lot more ambiguous than what I remember the book presenting. And, depending on the rules in the state under which they operate, it can be much easier for charter schools to cook the books on test scores than their public counterparts.

But I haven't looked at the research in a long time, and given my background, I'm pretty biased toward supporting institutions in the public sector.

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