Tag: math

Woke Math Doesn’t Add Up

Last week, the ODE promoted through its newsletter a short course called the “Pathway to Math Equity Microcourse.” The “microcourse” is designed for middle school teachers to teach them to use its toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.”

The toolkit, according to a Fox News report, includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” supposedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” The ones cited include that the “focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer’,” and students are “required to ‘show their work,’ ” which used to be keys to teaching math to grade-schoolers.

The toolkit says that “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so.” It adds that “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

Objectivity must be banned because its exercise disproves what the wokeist whackos are saying.

The toolkit encourages teachers not to focus on students getting the “right” answer but to come up with more than one answer to questions that are “equally right,” as if that were, ahem, mathematically possible. It also encourages teachers to adopt its guidelines to help “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”

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Woke Progressives Target Math Class As Racist For Expecting “Right Answer” Or “Showing Your Work”

The latest target of woke progressive lunacy is facts. Literally, facts.

Mathematics facts, to be exact.

Because now, according to woke progressives, finding the right answer and showing your work is actually racist and white supremacist.

The Oregon Department of Education newsletter promoted a teachers training program called “A Pathway to math Equity Micro-Course,” which is aimed at “dismantling racism in mathematics” through “ethnomathematics.”

Oh, you didn’t know that math is racist? You thought there were just objective facts that follow a set of mathematical laws and rules that don’t care about your feelings or the color of your skin? Just picture me rolling my eyes.

Well, the Oregon Department of Education has put together a toolkit to show teachers how to find the ways that “white supremacy culture” has “infiltrat[ed] math classrooms.”

Apparently, requiring students to “show their work” is racist. They say it is white supremacy to expect a student to write out the mathematical process and show the steps they took to arrive at the answer. Who cares if the teacher needs to see the student’s work in order to  ascertain whether the student understands the underlying mathematics principles or grasps the required processes. It doesn’t matter that showing your work enables teachers and students to identify trouble spots in lengthy or difficult math problems, especially in the event that the student arrives at the incorrect answer.

And speaking of arriving at the incorrect answer, that whole concept is also racist and white supremacist.

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Math Association Say Math “Inherently Carries Human Biases”, Citing Critical Race Theory

The MAA is a professional association of high school and university teachers. It hosts the American Mathematics Competitions for middle and high school students, as well as publishes academic journals. It prides itself as “the world’s largest community of mathematicians, students, and enthusiasts.”

In opposition to President Trump’s recent executive actions to ban the use of Critical Race Theory training in the federal government, the MAA said that critical race theory “is an established social science inquiry which is grounded in decades of scholarship,” further asserting that “it is misguided, at best, to reduce this theory to the race-blaming of white people and to define it and the discussion of systemic racism as a ‘divisive concept.’”

The statement then turned its attention to the inherent bias that allegedly exists in mathematics.

“Although mathematics, science, and higher education develop fact-based theories and practices that should inform policy, they are also political because they exist within a highly politicized system,” says the statement.

“Acknowledging that the United States has serious systemic discrimination has somehow leaped from a political issue to a partisan issue.”

In conclusion, the MMA says that “it is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases.”

“Until this occurs, our community and our students cannot reach full potential. Reaching this potential in mathematics relies upon the academy and higher education engaging in critical, challenging, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the detrimental effects of race and racism on our community,” the MMA added. 

Several American university professors signed the document. Among these are Jenna Carpenter, the Dean of Engineering at Campbell University and Victor Piercey, an actuarial sciences professor at Ferris State University.

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