Utopia Talk / Politics / Traditional math classes are racist

Rugian Member	Thu May 27 13:07:48 California Tries to Cancel Math Class A proposed curriculum framework aims low, abandons the gifted, and preaches 'social justice.' By Williamson M. Evers May 18, 2021 If California education officials have their way, generations of students may not know how to calculate an apartment’s square footage or the area of a farm field, but the “mathematics” of political agitation and organizing will be second nature to them. Encouraging those gifted in math to shine will be a distant memory. This will be the result if a proposed mathematics curriculum framework, which would guide K-12 instruction in the Golden State’s public schools, is approved by California’s Instructional Quality Commission in meetings this week and in August and ratified by the state board of education later this year. The framework recommends eight times that teachers use a troubling document, “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” This manual claims that teachers addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,” teaching math in a “linear fashion,” requiring students to “show their work” and grading them on demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter. “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” the manual explains. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’ ” Apparently, that’s also racist. The framework itself rejects preparing students to take Algebra I in eighth grade, a goal reformers have sought since the 1990s. Students in Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan master introductory algebra in eighth grade or even earlier. At one time, California took the goal seriously and made immense progress. California Department of Education data show that while only 16% of students took algebra by eighth grade in 1999, by 2013, 67%—four times as many—were doing so. Success rates, meaning the percentage of students scoring “proficient” or above, kept rising even as enrollment increased dramatically. The biggest beneficiaries were ethnic minority and low-income students. While student success tripled overall, African-American students’ success rate jumped by a factor of five, and Latinos’ and low-income students’ by a factor of six. Many highly selective colleges expect students to take calculus in high school. To get to calculus by senior year, students have to proceed on a pathway of advanced courses. The framework condemns this as a “rush to calculus” and indicates that California schools won’t provide such a pathway. California high-school grads may be put at a disadvantage in applying to top colleges. The framework explicitly rejects “ideas of natural gifts and talents.” That some are gifted in math implies some others aren’t, and this is “inequitable.” The framework’s authors also fear that those designated “gifted” may have their fragile egos hurt if they later lose that designation. So it writes an obituary for gifted-and-talented programs, which would hobble the rise of many talented children in California. The framework rejects ability grouping, also called tracking, even though studies show that students do better when grouped with others who are progressing in their studies at the same pace. We have known for years, including from a 2009 Fordham Institute study of Massachusetts middle schools, that schools with more tracks have significantly more math students at advanced levels and fewer failing students. The proposal’s agenda becomes clear when it says math should be taught so it can be used for “social justice.” It extols a fictional teacher who uses class to develop her students’ “sociopolitical consciousness.” Math, it says, is a tool to “change the world.” Teachers are supposed to adopt a “culturally relevant pedagogy,” which includes “the ability to identify, analyze and solve real-world problems, especially those that result in societal inequalities.” Under this pedagogy, “students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order.” Don’t think that kindergarten is too early for such indoctrination: “Teachers can take a justice-oriented perspective at any grade level, K-12,” the curriculum revisionists write. Students could be taught fractions in the distracting process of learning the math of organizing a protest march. This program is quite a comedown for math, from an objective academic discipline to a tool for political activism. Society will be harmed: With fewer people who know math well, how are we going to build bridges, launch rockets or advance technologically? Students will pay the heaviest price—and not only in California. As we’ve seen before, what starts in California doesn’t stop here. My advice to California’s Instructional Quality Commission, when it meets on Wednesday and Thursday to evaluate public comments on the curriculum framework, is to scrap the document and return to the 1997 math content standards and associated framework. Written largely by professors in Stanford’s math department, it resulted in the aforementioned stupendous statewide gains in algebra attainment. Teach math, not propaganda. http://www...-cancel-math-class-11621355858
Rugian Member	Thu May 27 13:10:49 As an update, the California Instructional Quality Commission decided to move forward with this last week. Western Civilization may not survive another century at this rate.
habebe Member	Thu May 27 13:47:17 Buying meat is also racist now, unless your black. The reasoning being that black people were the right timed slavery.Even though our European ancestors were enslaved, that doesnt count, because, you know racism. So BBQ is racism and evil, unless your black.
habebe Member	Thu May 27 13:49:21 http://youtu.be/23R_kBMVOAE Now the lefties.on here will say "Oh this is just culture war nonsense it means nothing" But considering that the near future will be loaded with people who beleive this nonsense is dangerous.
Sam Adams Member	Thu May 27 14:45:35 The framework explicitly rejects “ideas of natural gifts and talents.” That some are gifted in math implies some others aren’t, and this is “inequitable.” Rofl. Thats some seb-nekran bullshit right there.
habebe Member	Thu May 27 15:56:44 The so called "party of facts and science"
Sam Adams Member	Thu May 27 16:04:12 The "party of facts and science" thinks that genes are fake. Lulz.
Average Ameriacn Member	Thu May 27 16:25:03 1+1 is 2, no alternative facts can change that!!!
Sam Adams Member	Thu May 27 16:46:49 Stop using math. Racist misogynistic colonial settlers use math.
McKobb Member	Thu May 27 16:48:54 this some real wag-the-dog shit right here
nhill Member	Thu May 27 17:21:26 This is all just some wacky joke proposal that won't actually get implemented, right? ... Right? Please say yes.
nhill Member	Thu May 27 17:22:23 I was put 2 grades ahead of my classmates for math. Guess I'm just another racist misogynistic colonial settler.
Habebe Member	Thu May 27 17:53:13 Its California, who knows. I think it was VA that recently got rid of all advanced math classes because it was unfair.
Seb Member	Thu May 27 18:02:30 Well I clicked on the link the op-ed provides, http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter1.docx and several pages in, it seems to bear no relation at all to the claims being made by the op-ed. Mostly, it seems to be saying "stop telling kids that you are either good at maths innately or you are not, and find different ways to engage them". This is hardly controversial, it's been standard practice for a while in other countries. It has a point that to some extent, the way that maths is being taught has become somewhat performative and artificially constrained (e.g. how posh English schools teach Latin and Greek) focusing on rote methods rather than understanding. For example a given concept or proof could be approached through geometry or calculus - teaching computation can be done though the lens of symetries of objects (a rectangle built of 15 blocks can be rotated showing that rows and columns are interchangeable, whereas cutting it into three pieces of five, or five pieces of three results in two different outcomes) - or it can be approached by learning arbitrary rules. The phrase "white supremacy" doesn't appear. So far, the references to social justice seem to be entirely about showing how maths is not a dry, performative academic discipline but a tool that is highly beneficial and empowering to people who master it. You might not like describing this as "social justice" - but that is just semantics. Just to check though, does anyone here think that having a solid base of mathematics isn't something that is useful in a socio-economic sense? Basically, reading between the lines, the author is butt hurt that California is exploring different ways of teaching maths that might work for disadvantaged kids.
nhill Member	Thu May 27 18:11:34 Seb, that's only the first out of 13 chapters, and isn't the one referenced in the op-ed.
Seb Member	Thu May 27 18:12:14 Turns out he's part of the whole "Math wars" thing from the 80/90's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_wars Sounds like he's an advocate of traditional maths focus on rote methods rather than concepts. He's been banging on about reform maths, common core and other stuff for decades. He's just gussied up his arguments in some BS about it all being about wokeness to further his long standing agenda. He's basically demonstrably on the wrong side of the argument on how to teach maths - the "shut up and calculate" brigade.
nhill Member	Thu May 27 18:14:28 http://equitablemath.org/ This appears the be the contentious content that the op-ed references.
nhill Member	Thu May 27 18:15:26 I have not read it, yes. Simply doing some basic due diligence on what the actual claims reference.
nhill Member	Thu May 27 18:15:40 I have not read it, yet.*
nhill Member	Thu May 27 18:16:30 "We also wish to thank the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their generous financial support of this project."
nhill Member	Thu May 27 18:17:52 In other words, it's curriculum developed with funding from Bill Gates.
Habebe Member	Thu May 27 18:25:56 There persists a mentality that some people are “bad in math” (or otherwise do not belong), and this mentality pervades many sources and at many levels. Girls and Black and Brown children, notably, represent groups that more often receive messages that they are not capable of high-level mathematics, compared to their White and male counterparts (Shah & Leonardo, 2017). As early as preschool and kindergarten, research and policy documents use deficit-oriented labels to describe Black and Latinx and low-income children’s mathematical learning and position them as already behind their white and middle-class peers (NCSM & TODOS, 2016). These signifiers exacerbate and are exacerbated by acceleration programs that stratify mathematics pathways for students as early as sixth grade. Make of it what you will.
Habebe Member	Thu May 27 18:27:06 ^was just a small excerpt from.Sebs link.
Habebe Member	Thu May 27 18:27:52 Also, isn't bill gates a likely pedophile to has lied about vaccines?
Seb Member	Thu May 27 18:30:24 nhill: "Seb, that's only the first out of 13 chapters, and isn't the one referenced in the op-ed." Yeah, the op-ed is cricitising the framework, because it cites somewhere in there this other document. But it is clear that the concepts in this other document are not incorporated into the framework. I've started going through the "dismantling racism" document too, and it's clear he's crazily misrepresenting it. For example: "There is a greater focus on getting the right answer than understanding concepts and reasoning" - does anyone disagree that this represents bad practice in teaching? I mean, we've all seen this joke right? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQl040dANZw Yet this is presented by Evers as "getting the right answer is white supremacy". Similarly where he states that "show their work" is being criticised as white supremacy, what the document actually says is "Students are required to show their work in standardized, prescribed ways" - i.e. that the answer is only right if a particular methodology is used, even if an alternative valid methodology can be used. I can go on, but I shall not. I'm mildly skeptical of the idea that traditional teaching of maths needs to be looked at through a lens of white supremacy - lack of accessibility and rigid and ineffective teaching methods. This guy is just a died in the wool traditionalist raging against the whole shift away from traditional teaching methods. If he has to dress it up in culture war clothes to get traction, he is happy to do that. But nobody else needs to get dragged along for the ride.
Seb Member	Thu May 27 18:39:52 Habebe: Yeah, there is a tendency in the anglo-american world to put math on a pedastal as "either this thing you have a knack for, or a thing you don't". Asian cultures, and some other European cultures, do not take this approach. They treat it like grammar or English - everyone can and should be expected to be competent at it - and teach maths on that basis. That does not mean (as with any subject) there are not a range of aptitudes - but then there may be particular ways of teaching that are more effective for particular individuals. Again, this is not unusual in our approach to other subjects. This traditional mindset in US, UK and some other countries - "either you have math brain or you don't" - is why Asian kids used to score so much better at Maths in PISA ratings, and abandoning this approach and adopting these formed teaching approaches has helped us catch up in PISA scores. We basically point at a chunk of our kids and say "eh, you don't like learning abstract procedures that appear entirely abritary which are communicated in an unengaging way? Must be that you are shit at maths then, not my crappy teaching methods"
Seb Member	Thu May 27 18:41:28 nhill: "But it is clear that the concepts in this other document are not incorporated into the framework." I mean of course the concepts, as described by this idiot. In actual fact, the substance of the "dismantling racism" document isn't that controversial either, though framing them in terms of anti-racism seems and over-reach to me.
Seb Member	Thu May 27 18:46:07 I mean jesus, this whole argument was fought and won in the 90's - now they teach 5 year olds multiplication and division and commutation etc. at a conceptual level at 5; when back in the 8-'s they were still getting them to rote learn multiplication tables at 6 or 7. This guy is a dinosaur.
nhill Member	Thu May 27 18:50:47 > Yeah, there is a tendency in the anglo-american world to put math on a pedastal as "either this thing you have a knack for, or a thing you don't". I live in this anglo-american world, so let me correct you here: Nobody puts math nerds on pedestal. I had to endure countless shit. The "either you get it or you don't" attitude is simply an excuse for laziness and lack of interest. It allows people to categorize themselves as "not getting it" when things get a little tough. The thing about math is that there's simply some topics that come to you slowly compared to others. Mine was logarithms, for whatever reason. Differential equations and calculus were a breeze, relatively speaking. When people hit one of these topics it's much easier to say they just "don't get it" than it is to put the relatively increased effort into understanding it.
nhill Member	Thu May 27 18:54:12 The problem is we're telling all our kids that they're so fucking special and everything comes easy to them. Asians don't do that. So when shit gets hard our kids invent a reason outside of their personal locus of control, such as "i'm just not good at math". Which perpetuates the original deficiency and snowballs from there.
Nekran Member	Fri May 28 01:08:48 "The framework explicitly rejects “ideas of natural gifts and talents.” That some are gifted in math implies some others aren’t, and this is “inequitable.” Rofl. Thats some seb-nekran bullshit right there." What a strange thing to say about people who've been pointing out your extreme lack of any gifts or talents for over 2 decades.
Seb Member	Fri May 28 06:02:07 nhill: "I live in this anglo-american world, so let me correct you here:" So do I - you only need to look at how Maths is portrayed and has been traditionally taught - it's highly related to the two cultures (cf. CP snow). So, no, I don't take your correction, largely because you have fundamentally misunderstood. I said they put *maths* on a pedestal - that certainly does not mean they put math nerds on a pedestal. As a thing, it is treated as a super hard, unintuitive thing that you need to be different to get - and that particular aptitude is not necessarily seen as a good thing outside of the narrow concept of where maths is actually useful. To boil it down way too far "Ah, you are good at maths, that must mean you are an aspie weirdo who can't talk to people, because maths is super hard, and only people with weird different brains can do it" Maths is not treated as just another discipline that most people can get good at if they practice - e.g. law. We would not say "this person is a lawyer, being a lawyer is an innate skill, only some can be lawyers") e countless shit. "The "either you get it or you don't" attitude is simply an excuse for laziness and lack of interest. It allows people to categorize themselves as "not getting it" when things get a little tough." Yes, that's the point. It's also an excuse for lazy and unengaging methods of teaching - which is precisely what the educational reforms of the late 80's and 90's set out to tackle, and which this guy opposes. But it does not exist *simply* because it is an excuse - it is a deep-seated myth in Anglo American (and some other European cultures) related to the historical development of mass literacy and evolution of our society that has been built into education systems. "The thing about math is that there's simply some topics that come to you slowly compared to others. Mine was logarithms, for whatever reason. Differential equations and calculus were a breeze, relatively speaking." Yes, but that's true of many subjects also. I was really good at inorganic chemistry, shit at organic. In physics, brilliant at quantum, thermo and electromagnetism - GR, couldn't get my head around it. Pretty sure there will be the same thing in humanities subjects too. Now I don't know how you were taught, but one thing I often found with topics I couldn't get my head around is there is almost always more than one way to conceptualise what is going on. Traditoinal teaching of maths tends to focus on one particular methodology based on one particular conceptualisation. The thrust of the "dismantling racism" document is something like: 1. Traditional maths teaching obscure procedural docrtine and particular language over a firm grasp of the underlying concepts. 2. This creates a set of prior dependencies needed to be able to advance on maths that need not be dependencies. 3. The combination of these dependencies and baked-in conceptualisations particularly affect marginalised children by creating unnecessary barriers to learning. Now, I find it slightly tiresome that this is referred to as "white supremacy" - but to draw a parallel: it's as valid a criticism as made by religious reformists (of the type that eventually went on to found America a few generations later) that insisting the bible and religious texts and services be performed in Latin and not English created artificial power structures. And thus we ended up with the Tyndale Bible.
Seb Member	Fri May 28 06:05:00 "The problem is we're telling all our kids that they're so fucking special and everything comes easy to them." You are about a century too late. It was old when CP snow wrote his book in the late 50's.
nhill Member	Fri May 28 06:21:33 > You are about a century too late. It was old when CP snow wrote his book in the late 50's. That's not a refutation of my point, try again. Your previous post was so good, but then you have to go and engage in fallacies. Ever heard of selling past the sale? Read up on persuasion.
nhill Member	Fri May 28 06:24:35 Selling past the close may be easier for you to Google. Next time, implement that.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Fri May 28 06:59:10 Seb "super hard, unintuitive thing that you need to be different to get" Bad math teach can ruin people with enough talant. It is also true, that really talanted people with math PhDs may struggle with mid level stuff. I get the concerns, but math is hard, unintuitive and, like everything else there is an inherent ability in the background that isn't evenly distributed in any population. The concerns do not invalidate these facts, nor do these facts invalidate the concerns about bad math teachers and proper pedagogy. One problem is the binary explanation with a zero sum outcome. e.g For me to make my case around pedagogy, then I must necessarily disprove/dismiss the facts regarding inherent ability. Things are never that simple.
Seb Member	Fri May 28 09:48:19 Nhill: Ok, we may also be doing that, but the problem is much longer and deeper than "you are a special and everything should come easy" - we've been dividing kids into "scientists and mathematician weirdos" and "sociable linguists" for a lot longer - on the basis that science and mathematics require gifts and hard work; whereas other stuff just requires hard work. Nim: "but math is hard, unintuitive" Pretty much everything you get taught in high school isn't, if framed in the right way and then abstracted. The challenge is more that there is no universal right framing - and traditional methods shrug and go "ok, so lets teach the abstract, that's the most universal framing". And that is why you end up with this self re-inforcing idea of "you need to have special gifts to be good at maths" - the teaching methods select for people who easily conceptualizing things in the abstract; and exclude those that need more heuristic examples they can relate to their practical experience before abstraction. Or as a social studies professor of pedagogary might put it "Their lived experiences". "like everything else there is an inherent ability" The key word is "like everything else" - if you look at it, we start downgrading expectations in maths well before other subjects - at high school really. Maths is a potentially deep subject - so there is a question of cut off between what is useful for someone going into a career where higher maths is a critical tool, vs. what is needed to be a competent adult. We get it wrong, I think, in the UK certainly and I suspect some other western countries - where we write off things like probability and exponentials/logarithms and ability to interpret data as being "for technical careers only". And in part I think that is because we say "oh, you need an aptitude for this". Certianly we do not have an innately good sense of probability (in fact we have evolved specifically a bad one with lots of innate cognitive biases) - but that is precisely the point: they require effort and learning that must be taught to overcome the deficiency of common sense. This is no different to any other subject - but we give up and go "oh no, this is really only for technical career paths that are only open to specially gifted people who get this stuff easily". And that I think is a horrendous mistake. When I read this OP article and what it rails against side by side, what I see is not social justice warriors asserting maths as a social construct; but reform maths being advocated for as a means to improve accessibilty and outcomes by removing artificial barriers to an important discipline that can disproportionately affect disadvantaged children. This, to me, is entirely uncontroversial. The OP is an op-ed consisting almost entirely of disingenuous straw man arguments in defence of discredeted pedagogy.
nhill Member	Fri May 28 10:29:54 Getting rid of advanced tracks is a bit like throwing out the baby with the bath water, then. Wouldn't you agree? If the fundamental issue is psychological, 'equalizing' everyone in a systemic way won't solve it. And getting rid of stratification will only make it worse by punishing those with enough interest to accelerate their learning. I don't care much for the original author, either. And it's a lot of source material to digest, so I may be confusing their recommendations with their implications. But a lot of the wording suggests getting rid of advanced math classes.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Fri May 28 11:40:01 Seb Math is the abstraction of physical reality, there is no more abstractions to be made, atleast not without inventing new math. I think that _is_ what makes math difficult to learn and teach. All other subjects are manifestations of physical reality, while math is what is left when you have stripped reality from everything visible and physical and turned it into symbols and operator. In other words it isn’t an ability that has been very useful for our survival, unlike language and eye sight. It is the queerest subject of them all, truly. We have to recognize that fact parallell with whatever else we are doing to teach it better. I do agree with your concern about down grading expectations, I would just add, that isn’t that cause of the problem, it is the symptom of the problem.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Fri May 28 11:40:08 Seb Math is the abstraction of physical reality, there is no more abstractions to be made, atleast not without inventing new math. I think that _is_ what makes math difficult to learn and teach. All other subjects are manifestations of physical reality, while math is what is left when you have stripped reality from everything visible and physical and turned it into symbols and operator. In other words it isn’t an ability that has been very useful for our survival, unlike language and eye sight. It is the queerest subject of them all, truly. We have to recognize that fact parallell with whatever else we are doing to teach it better. I do agree with your concern about down grading expectations, I would just add, that isn’t that cause of the problem, it is the symptom of the problem.
Seb Member	Fri May 28 12:28:29 Nhil: It depends. I don't know enough any the specifics of your system, nor did I find in detail the bit in the actual plan. Early streaming is bad. That's well known. Separating kids prematurely can stunt those not on the fast track. Setting is a different approach. There's complexity there demanding a nuanced approach - and I should say streaming isn't necessarily a nuanced approach. An implication of "we should teach *everyone* calculus" is that there is no longer an advanced stream because everyone's on it - we've abandoned the culture of low expectations that says calculus is only for egg heads. Do you have an advanced stream for English? History? Art?
Seb Member	Fri May 28 12:32:14 Nim: Yes, Maths is an abstraction (I remind you, I have a PhD in physics...), but you don't need to *teach* it in the abstract.
nhill Member	Fri May 28 13:26:42 > Do you have an advanced stream for English? History? Art? Yes, we do for English and History in High School. Not Art, or at least not in the schools with which I'm familiar (I'm in the USA). You also nailed the name. :) It's called Advanced Placement and they have it for the majority of subjects around the country. International Baccalaureate is another such program.
nhill Member	Fri May 28 13:28:55 Looks like they do have it for art, too. Here's a list of Advanced Placement subjects: 2-D Art and Design 3-D Art and Design Art History Biology Calculus AB Calculus BC Chemistry Chinese Language and Culture Comparative Government and Politics Computer Science A Computer Science Principles Drawing English Language and Composition English Literature and Composition Environmental Science European History French Language and Culture German Language and Culture Human Geography Italian Language and Culture Japanese Language and Culture Latin Macroeconomics Microeconomics Music Theory Physics 1: Algebra-Based Physics 2: Algebra-Based Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism Physics C: Mechanics Psychology Research Seminar Spanish Language and Culture Spanish Literature and Culture Statistics United States History United States Government and Politics World History
nhill Member	Fri May 28 13:33:00 I also couldn't find specific wording about cancelling advanced tracks, so we may be engaging a straw man here. :) A lot of the stuff I read implied directly that advanced tracks are discriminatory, but AFAIK it doesn't make an explicit demand. But again, it's a shitload of material to parse through and I'm not interested enough to read all 100 pages or so.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Fri May 28 14:24:08 Seb Sorry, I read that wrong, as you wanting to abstract math. ”but you don't need to *teach* it in the abstract.” I actually agree with you on that.
Seb Member	Sat May 29 04:38:23 Nhill: In the UK the terms often used are setting and streaming. I don't know exactly how advanced placement works exactly. The point about setting is that it's sorting children by ability in that subject in that year; whereas streaming sorts kids into streams by ability overall - so if you are say, bad at maths, that might pull you down into a class teaching to lower expectations in other subjects too. So in my view setting is better than streaming. However in setting there another problem too, it's supposed to be in each school year, but some schools organise it such that there's really no practical way to catch up. One you get sorted into a lower set, that's it. Now if you are all proceeding to the same destination at different speeds, that's kinda ok. But if you aren't doing that, that can be pretty damaging. You perform badly in the first year because a particular topic is being taught in a way you can't easily grasp - suddenly you are on an inevitable path to never getting to calculus and statistics. That's what I took from the term "advanced placement". There's always going to be a tension between stretching those with an innate ability; but I think maths is one where we tend to be too quick to sort people into two camps early - and I suspect that camps are actually really about how receptive they are to particular teaching methods. I'm not saying we should remove opportunities for those that are gifted in maths; just ditch the idea that some highschool topics are "only" for those who are obviously gifted and be careful not to close of opportunities for those that aren't to achieve high attainment if they can. e.g. an undiagnosed dyslexic kid can go from he bottom quartile of the class at 10 to top quartile (in a selective school) by 14 purely due to the overweighting of written arithmetic at junior school. And neither of us seem to be able to find this idea that they are abolishing this advanced track anyway, I suspect it is a bit of a straw man woven from the actual content on being careful not to create the impression high attainment in Maths is only for the gifted.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Sat May 29 06:45:59 ”There persists a mentality that some people are “bad in math”” From the document. I assume then from what you have said so far, you disagree. Some people are indeed bad at math, just as some are gifted and everything inbetween. I take you concerns are in the details of how to assess this. I’m open to better ways of both teaching and assessing skills, but the premise of this document is that there isn’t a variation in ability and that the differnces we see are largely the result of social expectations.
Seb Member	Sat May 29 07:19:40 Nim: I don't think the mentality referred to as "some people are Bad at math" refers to a model of a normal bell curve continuum of ability that we see in other subjects; it is instead referring to an idea that the inevitable outcome of teaching will be a bimodal model distribution of attainment: those good and those bad at maths, therefore you might as well split people out and teach on that basis. You can choose to see it as statement rejecting a bell curve if you like, but I think that's effectively an argument you are having with yourself.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Sat May 29 09:44:12 I am just reading the words as they are, some people are indeed bad at math.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Sat May 29 10:17:25 Here is something I agree with: ”Students with learning differences that affect performance on computational tasks are denied access to richer mathematics, even when the learning differences might not affect other mathematical domains” That is a terrible approach which I know is true both personally and anecdotally. You can suck as some med level stuff and under the wrong teacher you will get terrible result. I started uni with a terrible math teacher and the result were there after (redo the exam). For the last semester we had another teacher, young guy, who would take nothing for granted and explain even the petty stuff, as if you knew nothing. Got an A. Having said that, there are so many red flags in that document, fashionable nonsense kind of red flags, that I can safely assume there is either no quantitative data driving it, or where it exists it is basically garbage. Call it intuition.
Seb Member	Sat May 29 10:36:26 Nim: "Call it intuition" Or just self-fulfilling prejudice: "if it's couched in the language of social justice it must be nonsense because everything that's couched in the language of social justice is nonsense". Aka confirmation bias. I mean you basically decided to re-interpret the "bad at maths" statement to be non-sensical, even when that meaning would make little sense contextually and runs at odds with the two decade old school of thought on teaching that the documents are citing. You are trying very hard to find reasons to criticise it. That's bad faith argumentation.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Sat May 29 10:45:19 Well, you basically interpreted to be something mindless and without any relevance reality. Confirmation bias. So far I am the only one of us, to pick up things I agree and disagree with. And again you are the first ine to start to make this personal and speculate about how hard I need to try to find things I find problematic and accuse me of bias. I have so far only opined on the document and no about your personal state of mind. Why do you need to make this about some personal deficiency I have? Should I also speculate?
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Sat May 29 11:11:15 So, what I did was actually the opposite of confirmation bias. I have a lot of (hobby level) experience with social science nonsense, and despite reading the document with diminished trust of that experience, I can find things I agree with without reservation.
Seb Member	Sat May 29 12:08:47 Well, yeah when you speculate on the validity and content of the document noting you've no objective evidence but purely based on your intuition - that's purely a statement about your state of mind isn't it?
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Sat May 29 12:15:59 No, it is a statement based on my experience with these documents and domains in academia. It can be wrong of course, but that is in addition to the specific things I pointed out, that I agree and disagree with. It is ultimately an empirical claim, either there are good quantifiable data driving this or there isn’t. My intuition says there isn’t, which is based on experience with the same exact issue of pedagogy and education in Sweden, which I actually posted here on UP, several years ago.
Seb Member	Sun May 30 13:29:47 Nim: "No, it is a statement based on my experience with these documents and domains in academia." That's just describing where your prejudices come from :-)
Seb Member	Sun May 30 13:32:53 "It is ultimately an empirical claim" Not really - if you are assuming without checking based on a model you've created, which is how you described it - that's the antithesis of empirical.
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