Posts
Now, for instance:
One place where this movement thrives is El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn, the city’s first “social justice” high school. The school’s lead math teacher, Jonathan Osler, is using El Puente as a base for a three-day conference in April on “Math Education and Social Justice.”
[snip]
Among those scheduled to speak at the conference is Eric Gutstein, a mathematics education professor at the University of Illinois and a former Chicago public school math teacher. Gutstein’s book, Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice, combines Marxist teaching methods [Marxist teaching methods?] with examples of math lessons for seventh-graders. One of these lessons is “The Cost of the B-2 Bomber—Where Do Our Tax Dollars Go?” Its purpose, Gutstein writes, “was to use U.S. Department of Defense data and find the cost for one B-2 bomber, then compare it to a four-year, full scholarship to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a prestigious out-of-state university. The students had to answer whether the whole graduating class of the neighborhood high school (about 250 students) could receive the full, four-year scholarships for the whole graduating class for (assuming constant size and costs) the next 79 years!” [guess and check!]
Gutstein also recounts how, on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, he was able to convince his seventh-grade math class that the U.S. was wrong to go to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan....
Another of the math conference’s “experts“ is Cathy Wilkerson, an adjunct professor at the Bank Street College of Education. Wilkerson’s only other credential of note (as listed by the conference’s organizers) is that she was a “member of the Weather Underground of the 60s.”
[snip]
After serving a brief prison term, she became a high school math teacher....
Radical Equations
by Sol Stern
So I guess they're not kidding about the shortage of qualified math teachers.
7 comments:
Conversely, I think after a short school term, I'll be read for full time prison.
And let me guess, they used a calculator, right?
I think of Singapore and Saxon as the ultimate "Math for Social Justice" curricula. Give every student, even those whose parents couldn't possibly help with homework or after school tutoring, a decent math education and a realistic shot of success in college. That's social justice in my book.
Here is a social justice math exercise.
Find the respective bases for these percentages. Recognize fractional representations as percents and also state base:
Nearly half US murder victims are black: report
Aug 9 04:22 PM US/Eastern
African-Americans are victims of nearly half the murders committed in the United States despite making up only 13 percent of the population, a report published Thursday showed.
Around 8,000 of nearly 16,500 murder victims in 2005, or 49 percent, were black Americans, according to the report released by the statistics bureau of the Department of Justice.
Broken down by gender, 6,800 black men were murdered in 2005, making up more than half the nearly 13,000 male murder victims.
Black women made up 35 percent, or 1,200, of the nearly 3,500 female homicide victims.
Young black men aged between 17 and 29 bore a disproportionately high burden in the grim statistics, making up 51 percent of African-American murder victims.
The percentage of white male murder victims in the same age group was 37 percent.
More than half the murders of blacks took place in densely populated urban areas.
Firearms were involved 77 percent of the time in homicides involving black people and around 60 percent of the time in murders of whites.
Most murder victims -- 93 percent of blacks and 85 percent of whites -- were killed by someone of their own race.
Gang violence was involved in around five percent of homicides with black victims against seven percent for white victims.
In percentage terms, whites were twice as likely to be killed by a current or former partner than blacks -- 12 percent of whites were murdered by a life partner against six percent of blacks.
Blacks were also at greater risk of rape or sexual assault than any other ethnic group except American Indians, the report showed.
“Math Education and Social Justice.”
"Here is a social justice math exercise."
Not commenting on the validity of this "exercise", an exercise is not a curriculum or an education. That's what this thread is about. (See Molly's comment.)
Speaking of this "exercise"... the assumption is that something should be done that isn't being done. Many would agree, but it shouldn't involve watering down math and expectations. That's the bigotry of low expectations.
Then again, many want to use the poor and disadvantaged as leverage for their own social agenda. This agenda becomes more important than individual educational opportunities. That's why you hear people claim that you can't fix education until you eliminate poverty. It's really the other way around.
Well there's the whole issue of the catch 22. But really, that's not engaging math.
I mean the main idea that they seem to have totally forgotten to teach (and is far more fundamental) is that unlike an education, military weaponry cannot be fed back into the economy. A tank cannot make more tanks. An education however, can create other educations, which can create further educations. It's the idea that the exponential curve will eventually take over the high rate of growth curve.
I mean, you could probably learn more from playing SimCity or Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri than doing those "exercises". At least those games allow you to gain a "feel" for what economy and rate of growth is.
Conversely, I think after a short school term, I'll be read for full time prison.
snort
Post a Comment