[primitivesuave]

Page 7 is where they completely lose me. "Students are required to “show their work” in standardized, prescribed ways" is a manifestation of white supremacy?

If you click on that item, it takes you to a page where they suggest non-standard classroom activities like "Have students create TikTok videos, silent films, or cartoons about mathematical concepts or procedures."

I'm pretty open minded about education pedagogy, but you completely lose me (and 99% of teachers) when you suggest creating TikTok videos so students can adequately express their mathematical understanding.

[dragonwriter]

> "Students are required to “show their work” in standardized, prescribed ways" is a manifestation of white supremacy?

“White supremacy” is an accurate but excessively polarizing term; “cultural favoritism in favor of status quo elites, whose preferences and cultural practices are encoded in the prescribed methods of demonstration” would perhaps both be less inflammatory and easier to see the connections between the specific practice and the broader problem.

> I'm pretty open minded about education pedagogy, but you completely lose me (and 99% of teachers) when you suggest creating TikTok videos

I think the particular examples are not because any of them are individually to be preferred but because providing a range including them illustrates the general principle, which is “provide students a broad set of mechanisms to demonstrate understanding rather than a narrow set of forms, as the latter introduces cultural biases based on comfort/familiarity with the form, both for the child immediately and among parents and the rest of the support network on which they rely.”

[mixmastamyk]

These kind of anti-solutions backfire.

Say there's a real problem, the police are killing people. Instead of solving that... well few of us have any power over that, so instead we resort to changing things we do have power over.

Like… watering down math classes and pretending that is even the thousandth thing on the list of solutions that should be tackled first as a response. It's so far down the list (and has better remedies) that it actually hurts the cause.

[dragonwriter]

> These kind of anti-solutions backfire.

Its not an anti-solution, and you provide neither evidence or reasoning to support your claim that it is part of a class of things that backfires.

> Say there's a real problem, the police are killing people

That is a real problem. Education is done in a culturally biased manner which perpetuates the disadvantage or marginalized groups is also a real problem. As is the fact that education is done by outdated methods which underserve even the best served, on top of the inequities. The former one doesn't negate the latter two.

> Like… watering down math classes

This is not about “watering down” math classes, but the opposite; it is about applying evidence to improve the quality and equity of mathematical instructions.

I don't except that my tax dollars should be wasted on broken on biased math just because we haven't fixed racist violence by police.

[s1artibartfast]

>This is not about “watering down” math classes, but the opposite; it is about applying evidence to improve the quality and equity of mathematical instructions.

This ignores a majority of students that are are well severed through the current curriculum and would advance more slowly under the proposal.

[dragonwriter]

> This ignores a majority of students that are are well severed through the current curriculum and would advance more slowly under the proposal.

The framework cites the research that that isn't the case, where is yours that says it is?

[s1artibartfast]

Can you point me to where in in the framework it has the data? I couldn't find it

[mixmastamyk]

It was these folks (and it seems you agree) that decided to wrap up a few good suggestions (and a few bad ones) in political propaganda with only the most tenuous tangent to relevance.

People recognize that pretty easily and are instantly turned off. So yes, it backfires, poisoning any hope they had to convince. Re-read this comment section from top to bottom for your evidence.

[s1artibartfast]

When your sole metric is equality, it is easier to hold all students back than address the issues causing a subset of of students to underperform.

It is most akin those who advocate for harsher penalties for white criminals to because penalties are disproportionately harsh for minorities.

[primitivesuave]

Completely agree with the polarizing nature of that term and your less inflammatory description. However, I am still unconvinced that lowering the bar or creating a "toy version" of mathematics expressed in different ways is the appropriate solution.

I find it akin to forcing all K-12 students learning computer science to stay on Scratch and block-based programming (which is easily accessible to everyone), simply because the students taking more advanced programming courses who have a software developer for a parent will be unfairly advantaged over the ones who don't. I know people who have had all the resources available and wasted most of them, and others who had few resources available but took every one of them.

At the end of the day, I'd rather have the opportunity to hire a great software developer who has been developing their skills since a young age, rather than someone who was intentionally kept from real-world computer science until college in the name of equity. Similarly, I'd rather see prodigious mathematicians cultivated from a young age - I cannot imagine a situation where the next Ramanujan [1] is created by the California public education system.

By the way, I really appreciate the illuminating alternate description you provided of white supremacy - I hope you don't mind if I start repeating that one :)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

[mturmon]

But it turns out that if you believe math is everywhere, then creating videos or cartoons to illustrate math concepts is actually kind of reasonable.

For instance, my kid drew a rather detailed human face in the desmos (http://desmos.com) graphing program using line segments, quadratics, cosines, and sines.

Doing this teaches you about what the graphs of these functions look like, and how to translate/scale/rotate the axes to get the curve you want.

It's basically like parametric typography, or SVG.

[mixmastamyk]

Pretty neat, but I'd say that is different than a selfie-video. Those can be very creative as we all know, but that's what art class is for.