Lots of people don't have good memories of math class in primary or secondary school. Attacking math is probably good politics.
I don't think they think they're attacking math? I think they think they're pro-math, and anti-mushy-bullshit.
The Democrats should attack math then.
I'm only using Roman numerals because that's my culture.
Critical Number Theory is the true enemy!
Stupid journals are giving me trouble, especially on thy tables.
No more indoctrinating our kids with half-baked theories about "irrational" and "imaginary" numbers!
"Clearly their angle is ....not exactly irrational". But is it discrete? & with regard to the angle, units matter. Any rational fraction of a circle is certainly an irrational number of radians.
8: Irrational numbers are Roman numerals since it's 'i'. You just need to be careful because 'Vi' and 'VI' are different.
My son kept writing things like "x=y" and I kept telling him to stop. He's like "what's the difference?" I had to go into social construction.
Has he learned about functions yet?
Yes, but I don't use those much so I don't care. Statistics is all y=mx + b
10: Puns aside (just for a second), it is all identity. The problem is that for some reason, the identity they picked is "shitheel."
It's not exactly irrational. ... From both their side and my side, it makes perfect sense.
This has been my project for awhile now: Comprehending the genuine rationality behind things like ivermectin or the "belief" that Biden stole the election and is thus a threat to democracy.
Liberals lack a vocabulary for this conversation. We almost invariably end up saying things like:
of course DeSantis et al are anti-SEL, because they actually have a stupidly low social-emotional intelligence.
DeSantis, I propose, is probably governor of Florida because of his exceptionally high social-emotional intelligence. (I am inclined, however, to put Trump in a different category from DeSantis.)
We are so lacking in a vocabulary for this, that in the article linked above, the New York Times attributes the language of the Right to a misplaced concern for democracy. The NYT gets that this "concern" isn't grounded in fact, but entirely fails to grasp the actual basis for it.
So I want new words. I want to talk about "para-rationality" or "para-belief" or "para-truth" or something. People need to understand that Kellyanne Conway was not being ironic or slyly sarcastic when she coined the phrase "alternative facts."
I don't think the words are lacking. Seeking power by identifying an outgroup to blame problems on and attacking them is fascism.
The problem is lots of people want things that fascism promises. I don't know exactly what to do about it, but I don't think carefully prepared responses about how actually the gays aren't actually poisoning the well will be sufficient.
19: Yeah, my concern here is not about improving the souls of fascists. It's about understanding where they are coming from. It's an effort to improve my thinking.
The thing I'm trying to comprehend, Orwell understood it deep in his bones. In 1984, he didn't portray O'Brien as irrational.
To me, social-emotional intelligence has a pro-social/cooperative/collaborative element. It's not just a clinical intelligence that can be exploited by a shitheel.
20: Where they're coming from is "I'm strong enough to make you bend to this. "
21: Right, and I am resistant to framing this in terms of intelligence or rationality or whatever. DeSantis (I say) lacks social-emotional decency.
23: I agree. It's bad morals, not stupid.
I think casting the issue as intelligence hurts you because nobody likes to be called stupid and the liberal impulse to try to solve evil with education tends to make people feel like they're being called stupid even if they don't disagree with you on that.
But learning math means feeling stupid very often. That's probably unavoidable.
The hardest math problem in the Bible is 7*70, so maybe we shouldn't teach the 8* and 9* tables?
But learning math means feeling stupid very often. That's probably unavoidable.
To be earnest for a sec, this is a large part of why the SEL stuff helps. How do you handle the uncomfortable emotions? Are you flooded and just want to shut down because it's revealing that you are a stupid person? Or can you keep perspective, and not make it mean some terrible thing about yourself, and remain in the space where you can explore and try different things and keep chipping away at the problem?
The hardest math problem in the Bible is 7*70, so maybe we shouldn't teach the 8* and 9* tables?
It also implies that pi equals 3. Biblical math is atrocious even by the standards of the time. You'd think all that time in Babylonia would have had some effect on this, but apparently not.
I just read Jamelle Bouie's column exhorting Democrats to engage with the culture wars. Scattered thoughts:
- The clothes in that top picture are all striking but I really can't stop looking at the tie on the right. You should click through solely for this tie.
- I'm not sure about the efforts to boost C. R*fo's profile -- interviewing him, circulating his highly quotable statements, making him out to be the mastermind of the culture wars.
- All the top comments, before I stopped reading, were complaining about wokeness in education to some degree. Just spontaneous consensus, I'm sure.
- More and more, I keep thinking about the Democratic party's gerontocracy problem. (You've all seen the Feinstein discussion go by, right?) It would be one thing if there really were a leadership vacuum, which is sometimes how it feels! But no, the leaders are there...
It may be hard to keep my thoughts about this stuff and my thoughts about Marine Le Pen separate.
17: Seems exactly as useful as trying to project some philosophical coherence on the behavior of a grade school bully and their followers.
I think the Babylonians weren't very nice to the Jews.
See also: attempts by academics to place fascism within the history of political theory.
31: You have identified the exact location of our disagreement. I say: Grade school bullies are definitely philosophically coherent, and their methods and mindset are appropriate subjects for study and reflection.
One of the most insightful pieces of political journalism was in some Maureen Dowdish article in Newsweek that placed Gore and Bush in their respective high school roles, only they should've gone back to elementary school. Republicans resent their teachers and their favorite pets, whereas Democrats remain forever expectant that the teacher will announce that they are right and reprimand all those hooligans.
That's an insightful piece of banned analogy, bro.
Sorry. I tried to nitpick -- but this leaves us with the question of all the other students, let us consider the vicissitudes of childhood popularity, etc. -- then gave up because of the life-giving analogy ban.
I actually had to look up what the conservative issue is with the Common Core, another reason given for banning textbooks, and it's been a thing for years. Sharing in the unlikely event that anyone else was as ignorant of this issue as I was...
I knew it was a big thing but I have no idea what it is. I assume it's a core that's common.
I think normcore is the same thing.
Apple core, Baltimore, who's your best friend?
You've all seen the Feinstein discussion go by, right?
I want everyone to know that I hated Feinstein way back, way before hating Feinstein became popular. I hate her with artisanal hate based on her policies, not with some mass-produced hate based on her holding on to her seat despite dementia.
37.1: I don't think you need to slot the "other kids" into exact roles: everyone in school instinctively sides with one or the other, except for the sliver who remain aloof and go on to vote third party.
30.1 is correct.
I feel obligated to note that Drum shares an example of a math problem that got a book banned, and tbf it's a pretty legit one: a bar chart showing that conservatives are more racist. Regardless of the truth of it, it's a really obviously inappropriate thing to use as an example for a data problem--off topic at best, inflammatory at worst.
Now, the state gave exactly 4 examples, and I strongly suspect that that's because there are exactly 4 instances this clear, but this is a really clear one.
I hadn't seen that one! The examples in the NYT were way more mellow.
41: I said something negative abt DiFi 10+ years ago to my SIL who had lived in SF during or immediately after her mayoralty, and she was rather sharp with me. Scrolling through the wiki page for her mayoralty, I'm not really sure why, other than being generally (but not militantly) pro-gay.
But anyway, she seems to be cruising on accumulated goodwill from decades ago.
The examples in the NYT were way more mellow.
Which is a good example of how the NYT can be the worst of all worlds: be shitty towards elected Dems, be deferential towards elected Rs, but then vaguely comfort readers' liberal prejudices when this sort of thing comes up.
I don't believe in steelmanning your opponents' arguments, but you certainly need to look at the strongest arguments they make.
42: Everyone in school instinctively sides with either the teacher's pet or the bully? Maybe I went to weird schools.
At my school, they liked the ones good at sports.
A lot more of you are pets than you realize.
Every time someone said that to me, I stole their lunch money.
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My sister just bought a steer. As a companion for her goats.
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What if the goats get castration anxiety?
Maybe that's the point. Teach 'em who's boss.
There are disadvantages to this as a political strategy.
GOD, this elementary school politics analogy is like a JIRA ticket that keeps getting reopened. REASSIGNED.
50: In grades 1-8, I think Sister Elizabeth Ann was the only teacher who liked me. She told me how things were going to turn out for me: I would ultimately be killed in a bar fight.
53: I think in all the relevant cases, that'd be castration regret. Hard to be anxious about the past.
Tell that to a southerner with a Civil War statue.
58: The best teachers really get to know you.
The trouble is you never know how many bar fights you'll be in prior to that last one.
56: Evidently it needs to be brought up enough times for you to learn what is and isn't an analogy.
But anyway, she seems to be cruising on accumulated goodwill from decades ago.
She doesn't even need that. All she has needed is for her opponents to be relatively less attractive -- which happens easily because a whole lot of smart (maybe in an SEL sense?) people decide that taking her on isn't what they think their future looks like, so they want to see if she'll retire. There are certainly times when an upstart can upend an incumbent in a primary, but I don't think people really understand just how special and talented AOC is that she could pull this off. Most people are too instutionalized to try and too inept in the decathlon that is a political campaign to succeed.
My sister just bought a steer. As a companion for her goats.
Believe it or not, this subject came up in a deposition I defended this week. The testimony -- or if we're weren't on the record for the meat of it, the wisdom -- was that you should never just get one cow. One gets bored and wants to get out of the field and find (a) friends or (b) adventure. Two hang out with each other. They're not doing much, but they don't feel like they have to.
I think the CA Dem party has not endorsed Feinstein for at least two elections. It was such a bummer that she ran last time, but Villaraigosa isn't that inspiring either.
I assume her staff is fine and propping her up to vote appropriately. I don't know that we've lost any actual value. Surely someone will talk her out of running again.
The California jungle primary makes it easier to replace an incumbent, I think, because the general election came down to two Democrats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Senate_election_in_California, making it possible to vote against her without worrying about throwing away the incumbency advantage in the general. That worked in the House a bit earlier when we were able to replace Pete Stark with Erick Swalwell in a race between two Dems, but de Leon came up a bit short here.
In terms of the culture war article: Worth noting that The Lavender Scare was arguably a bigger deal to the far right than Red Scare and that purging gays and ruining their lives was more fun for the fifties right than purging commies. Since we don't really have commies anymore, it's the fun of purging LGBTQ people again. I really urge you not to underestimate the amount of pleasure the right takes in attacking and destroying us*.
And that's the emotional intelligence bit and that's how we could frame it - there's evil emotional intelligence and good emotional intelligence, except one could probably have punchier terms. Evil emotional intelligence is of course understanding the pleasure of hatred and mobilizing it - that's how the far right recruits and gets elected. (Not, of course, that the left/anarchists/etc don't ever mobilize the pleasure of hatred but it's not really our primary mode.) The pleasure of believing something you know to be stupid and false just so that you have an excuse to get angry and attack people - like all those people who pretended that they believed that students who "identify" as cats were being given litterboxes in school. They don't believe that, they don't believe that Mark and Steven down the street are pedophiles who are "grooming" Baby Estelle. They enjoy pretending to believe it because it gets them the three minute hate, but if you shot them up with sodium pentothal they'd tell you they know it's bullshit. Some of these people are ignorant, yeah, but they aren't meaningfully dumber than average.
Don't underestimate where this stuff is going. It is going toward murders and mass shootings and national laws that say GLBTQ people can't work around youth and the heavy duty policing of gender conformity in schools and at work. I have to tell you, I have never really, really worried about my personal safety as a visibly queer and gender non-conforming person, but I worry now - this stuff is social contagion, lots of "liberal" Minnesotans will find that they enjoy being anti-gay, lots of men will find that they enjoy getting to beat up the queers again. I am definitely getting more scared out on the street now.
*If you are not plugged in to LGBTQ twitter, I have to tell you that the stories coming out of Texas and Florida are really horrible in a way that larger scale reporting doesn't capture - individual kids afraid they will be taken away from their families, teachers bullying LGBTQ students, teachers telling kids with gay parents that their parents are "groomers" and pedophiles, etc.
I was in a shitty mood yesterday (which has continued until today, sorry) because I wrote up, and then deleted, a long comment about how the current "groomer" panic is going to make me lose my mind from rage, because it dredged up a lifetime's worth of anger and fear and existential stress*. I think this is the first time here that I've hit something that is too painful to discuss for me. I suppose I can sit back for a moment and take that fact in. But apart from that, it is indeed an all hands on deck moment. The mass movement on the right is snowballing very fast. Pride month starts in June and I am both concerned about violence and frustrated that stochastic violence seems to be really, really hard to estimate or predict.
* Apart from the obvious reasons, this is specifically related to horrible people fundraising on made-up concern about child safety when no one soliciting or giving those funds has ever given a shit about actual child safety**, a fact for which I have a lifetime of receipts b/c of my parent's line of work. It is infuriating in a way I didn't realize was possible. I told lourdes I have just turned into a gif of Leon in Blade Runner.
** indeed, they are the same people who want to force children to give birth after being raped and impregnated by family members. It's not politics, it's terrorism.
66: Pretty sure Villaraigosa was running for governor most recently, not senator?
De Leon seemed a better alternative to Feinstein at the time, but now that he's running for LA mayor he's fully in bed with the wealthiest ostensibly-left-NIMBY in the state (AHF/Weinstein). Maybe he was before too, I don't know.
It's somewhat counterintuitive, but it seems like "swingy" states controlled by Republicans end up the absolute worst. Partly because it brings out the most antidemocratic tendencies, partly because moderate Republicans seem to be weakest in swing states. Things seem especially fucked in FL, TX, NC, etc. I am optimistic that what we're going through now is overreach, I mean conservatives tried to drum gay teachers out of elementary school back in the 70s and it failed then. But it sure is really scary right now.
It's somewhat counterintuitive, but it seems like "swingy" states controlled by Republicans end up the absolute worst. Partly because it brings out the most antidemocratic tendencies, partly because moderate Republicans seem to be weakest in swing states.
Yes, this is the corollary of how very red states often have significantly less insane Republicans. When one party overwhelmingly controls the state, moderates tend to align with that party and exert a moderating influence, whereas when the partisan balance is more even moderates shift back and forth and the parties are dominated by their most extreme elements. The Republicans are now so extreme in general that that results in some really bad outcomes when they control those swing states.
This is also why policy outcomes in overwhelmingly Democratic states like New York and California are less progressive than you might expect.
I thought it was because lots of people are assholes regardless of politics.
I used to proclaim 71/72 - Texas was less hostile to Hispanic people than it might have been. But we're nowhere near swingy (imho) and we're racing to the bottom as hard as possible. I think the trajectory of Tea Party -> Trump -> whatever the fuck they are now has wrecked that "safe Republicans recognize they have to actually govern" thing of yore.
Texas is admittedly hard to fit into this framework. It definitely does seem to pattern with states like Florida and Wisconsin, in contrast to places like Utah and Indiana. Maybe there's some other factor besides partisan balance driving this, but I do still think partisan balance is an important factor.
My understanding (although I'd defer to Cala) is that Utah was saner in 2016 when Mormons rejected Trump, and now far too many have embraced him. This is from my ex-Mormon friend with family there, at least.
My memory is that Texas wasn't super sold on Trump in 2016, for that matter. I think they still preferred someone like Cornyn, in a way. There weren't Trump Trains and perpetual violence like there was in 2020, or even in 2017 for that matter.
This isn't exactly about Trumpiness per se. Obviously he hasn't been very principled in actually defending them, but fights with LGBT people wasn't a big part of Trump's brand. He is a New Yorker after all, see also Giuliani, Rudy.
There's a bunch of ways in which the Trumpy wing of the Republican party has gone way past Trump on issues other than anti-Democracy (see also vaccination). The core Trump thing was racism + anti-democracy + trolling + moderation on non-immigration policies.
The thing about places like Utah is that you see more pushback on right-wing craziness within the GOP, like the Republican governor vetoing the anti-trans student athletics bill. And of course immediately being overridden by the legislature; it's not like there's a lack of craziness in these places. But it's hard to imagine that kind of intra-right conflict in a place like Florida, for whatever reason.
The explanation I'm positing is that in Florida opposition to this stuff is led by the Democrats and immediately gets cast into culture-war terms in a way that isn't so much the case where everyone in power is on the same team. But maybe that's just changing, and Texas is further along that road than Utah, with Florida ahead of both?
And the thing about 80 is that most politicians don't like having intra-party fights. So when you do get something like Utah in 80 (we have a similar veto here, but the legislature is out of session so the override hasn't happened yet) it doesn't tend to escalate further in the same way that things spiral in Florida where the Republicans are all excited to win against Democrats and want further wins.
The exception to this is during primary season itself where there's more of an incentive to pick intra-party fights.
(Obviously there are exceptions, everyone hates Ted Cruze precisely because he likes picking intra-party fights all the time.)
I'm not completely clear on the trend among solid-red states. Tennessee and Idaho seem as crazified as any; similarly much of the Bible Belt. To the extent that all politics is national now, I'm not sure how much local differences will persist. I guess there's a swath of the Plains states that seem calmer?
The guy from Tennessee I follow on twitter seems to think that nothing like what you see in Florida is actually happening there. They passed some bills but then the governors office just isn't doing anything with them. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tennessee-restricted-teaching-about-race-one-year-later-law-sits-mostly-unused-11649669400
At least Orin Hatch didn't live to see this.
In a one party state, moderates who want to be politically active are going to identify with the dominant party, because it's the only game in town. And moderate voters are going to vote for them, so they'll win some races. I'm represented by one of the most moderate Republicans in our state senate. I've never voted for the guy, but my friends in the delegation are glad that he's there, and not one of the whackos from farther north or farter east.
One of the articles of faith of the Tea/Trumpist faction is that such people should be purged. There are going to be places where this doesn't work, but on the whole the fact that Dems are pretty much near universally pro-choice (in governance even where not in inclination) means that a whole lot of alienated voters are simply unavailable to them.
84 In Idaho, you have a split between the conventionally conservative governor and the whackjob lt governor. The legislature is pretty bad, but the judiciary isn't nearly as bad.
Our judiciary is doing a great job. A couple of days ago, a judge struck down another of the whacky bills -- this one dealing with revised birth certificates for trans people. Our judges are elected, so some prior record of accomplishment is expected, even in the jackrabbit counties.
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We did not buy the steer as a companion for the goats, but because we are both committed non-vegetarians and store-bought meat is sad. The steer (named Moo-Moo by his previous owners, now called Duncan so at least he can have some dignity) appears to have been well loved but half-starved and is a complete pet. Follows us and the goats around everywhere. The goats are still quite nervous about him, but interested, and I have great hopes that they will allow him to at least peripherally join the herd. Our plans to eventually eat him are going to be more difficult than we had initially anticipated.
Goats butt heads all the time, but frequently it is at the level of a fist bump, a sort of 'hey man, how's it going,' kind of thing. Duncan had lived with sheep and goats previously, and one of the best things so far was seeing him politely bump heads with Boris, our smallest (but perhaps bravest) goat. Boris is quite special in his own right - he had a bout of listeriosis when he was 6 months old which caused encephalitis, and while he has fully recovered, he has the somewhat mystical appearance of someone who has walked toward the light only to return and bring enlightenment. I think he understands Duncan on a deeper level than the rest of us, and I hope he will continue to broker relationships between the species.
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We buy sad store-bought meat, but I do like the bespoke chicken at Whole Foods.
I did too - and we don't eat very much chicken now that all but one of the roosters have made it into the pot. Also, as far as I can tell, a roast chicken just isn't a thing if you let them free range - way too tough. Amazing when cooked low and slow. Chicken and pastry, big noodles made with some butter or lard in the dough, is a revelation....
Like of truth or just revealing something that tastes good?
The south is full of cafeteria style restaurants, including many independent ones, and chicken and pastry (or dumplings, same dish different name) is a bland, soggy staple. Homemade is very tasty.
43: it has basically become an article of faith in education circles that inserting politics into.nath problems is good pedagogy. The general centering of "equity" in math education won't trigger "normie" liberal concern until public schools stop offering calculus for equity reasons, but the right-wing nutjobs are correct that the educational establishment has been ideologically captured and is basically a runaway train at this point.
Into.nath, into math, potato potahto
I was told there would be no story problems.
Personally, I have my doubts that the war on calculus will become a big deal but I admit that I forgot it all and have to look it up if I need it now.
102: I guess I was just surprised to discover that HS calculus will probably persist on purely political grounds (i.e., educated parents care about it a lot and school boards are elected bodies), as opposed to, say, some sort of ideological commitment from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, etc. to provide preparation for STEM careers to students within the public education system. But tracking is racist, rushing is bad, "advanced" math is gatekeeping, and calculus is old-fashioned and out-of-touch, so it's really all about power and nothing else.
it has basically become an article of faith in education circles that inserting politics into.nath problems is good pedagogy.
I was surprised at 43, too, and agree that this sort of thing is a bad idea. But it seems correct that inserting "politics" -- that is, information on how numbers reflect life -- into math problems is good pedagogy. Schools, unfortunately, are required to be interested in things other than teaching and learning, as the Florida example shows.
I mean, yeah, you can't teach kids that racism demonstrably correlates with conservatism. You just can't. But once you concede that contempt for the plain truth is an ideal toward which we must strive -- especially in fields like education and journalism -- you don't get to complain about the obvious and necessary result.
Well, OK, you can complain, and I do. But you can't be surprised.
Obviously, that racism is related to conservatism should be in social studies instead of math.
My last high school history class was a guy trying to convince us that Nixon wasn't that bad.
My religion teacher tried to convince us Ronald Reagan was an asshole. I'm still in touch with her (i.e. see her Facebook posts).
I wonder if there are any math textbooks with story problems related to climate change. Critical Climate Theory is another danger that needs to be addressed.
until public schools stop offering calculus for equity reasons
California is flirting with this. I find it distressing as a policy, then distressing again to be flanked from the left.
112: yeah, California is "leading" the way, but it's a national movement. It came up in Virginia in 2021 for example. It's somewhat fascinating / horrifying to me that if you want to do something concrete about it, the politics are such that it makes sense to partner with "ban CRT" Republicans, since Democratic politicians will basically duck the issue (at best). Kevin McCarthy and Devin Nunes signed a letter urging the California Board of Ed to rethink this, while Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker signed a letter asking the NSF to figure out how to better teach "data science" in high schools.
105: education people seem deluded that this is a good way to teach *math*, not civics.
I'm torn. On the one hand I hate how high school calculus is taught, and wish more students came in as a blank slate for calculus but with a stronger background in algebra, precalculus, and fractions. On the other hand, the reform proposals don't sound at all like they're addressing that problem.
A real programming course in high school would be kinda great though. It would make such a huge difference in teaching summation notation, for example. Would be thrilled for students to come in knowing basic programming but not calculus.
But teaching statistics or worse "data science" to students who don't understand graphs and can't program is just incredibly stupid.
Yeah - I feel like the programming angle could be really fascinating and is something that is genuinely much easier/cheaper to deliver now than 30 years ago. And there is a lot of evidence that it is much better to have a solid foundation than to "rush" to calculus in HS without that foundation. But the meat of the reform proposal is keeping everyone in the same math classes through grade 10, and almost everything else proposed is done with an eye towards making that easier and more justifiable, which means that the talk about data science is much more "marketing" than it is about substance.
Nobody has ever explained "data science" to me, but that might be because I've never admitted I don't know.
I have a strong opinion about pedagogy in math. That opinion is to just nod along with whatever someone says. As near as I can tell, teaching calculus in high school is mostly parents who can't afford to bribe sailing coaches looking to get their kids into college. But I guess I'm now complicit in that.
Basically all these internet companies have just massive amounts of data (who clicked what and when etc.) and want to find patterns in it, which they do using some combination of programming, linear algebra, statistics, and weird tricks. Think stuff like that old Netflix Prize to better predict what films people would like.
Our high school does this dumbass thing where it has the strong students take AB calculus as juniors, and then BC calculus as seniors, as if they're sequential, which they're not.
Maybe it's fine, who cares. Students can learn it more deeply the second time, I guess.
117: something I realized recently was that many (most?) people don't like math, and so they don't understand that there might be a reason for a high school student to study calculus that isn't "keep black people down" "game college admissions" "make people who don't like math feel bad about themselves."
So, I'm a statistician-ish person and I don't understand the reason beyond "game college admissions." But I'm also a parent with a kid on track to take high school calculus. Do I contradict myself? Well, then, I contradict myself. I am large and very, very inattentive.
Our high school does this dumbass thing where it has the strong students take AB calculus as juniors, and then BC calculus as seniors, as if they're sequential, which they're not.
This is what I did in high school. I don't remember much from either class.
I mean, I don't think I'm that large, but my doctor pointed out my BMI as a reason to start controlling by lipids and blood pressure with medication.
education people seem deluded that this is a good way to teach *math*, not civics.
The thing about math is a lot of people find it super boring, so mixing it up with topics they may have some interest in can have pedagogical benefits.
I don't think most the people super concerned about Maya Angelo being referenced in a math curriculum would have the same objection if the reference was to, say, Andrew Jackson. The problem isn't mixing math and civics. The problem is that people are racist.
Yeah, I strongly suspect one reason Florida rejected some of those math textbooks is that some of the kids in the illustrations were Black.
education people seem deluded that this is a good way to teach *math*, not civics.
It is absolutely a good way to teach math. (Spike covers this, but I'm going to chime in redundantly anyway.) Are we going to ban word problems as ineffective mathematics pedagogy because they have content that isn't math?
I think we agree that it's obviously bad politics, and that schools must be sensitive to politics. So yeah, it's a bad idea. And we can maybe be condescending about the teachers' naivete, but -- speaking for myself -- I have a rule: I don't regard people with contempt when they are making a good faith effort to tell the truth.
And do we seriously think that DeSantis's objections would be addressed in any meaningful way whatsoever if those charts were moved to civics class?
I live in a very liberal enclave where they wouldn't dream of fucking around with calculus, and I'm glad. My kids get (or will get) two years of calculus.
I took a year of calculus in high school -- the highest math I could take forty years ago at my then-above-average school. I did badly and remember none of it except for one thing: The experience was a revelation; like touching the face of God. I'm serious about this. For a moment, I felt like I grasped something deep and important about the universe.
My son in college is changing his major (in part with my encouragement) to the school's knew data science program. Y'all need to let me know if he's making a big mistake.
Data science seems like a really good way to earn a living.
128: I'm not calling for word problems to be banned, or for math to be taught in a way that is disconnected from students' experiences and interests. But students are not as collectively fascinated by equity initiatives as math reformers are, and there is no evidence hat hamfistedly incorporating reading comprehension exercises about Maya Angelou is a good way of helping kids learn algebra.
I am also not saying that DeSantis or any Republicans are good faith critics of education reforms; but it is true that if you need politicians to weigh in on bad reforms, the unfortunate reality is that the GOP nutjobs are effective allies, because the Dem response will be "wait are you telling me that equity isn't important, or that there is no social component to learning math, or that it's wrong to refer to a black person in a word problem, or that there aren't massive racial inequities in education, or that Republicans have good politics, or that..."
129: nothing wrong with a data science major; my complaint here is about HS data science as a substitute for, say, Algebra 2 or precalculus.
But students are not as collectively fascinated by equity initiatives as math reformers are, and there is no evidence hat hamfistedly incorporating reading comprehension exercises about Maya Angelou is a good way of helping kids learn algebra.
I would agree that white students are not as collectively fascinated as math reformers are, and indeed many white students share an annoyance at any perceived undue expose to "wokeness", whatever that might be.
On the other hand, people seem puzzled why more Black women don't go into STEM fields. That being the case, would a math book that engages Black girl students with content they can positively relate to really be the worst thing in the world?
Are there citations for the screenshots linked in 43 or does everyone believe the state of Florida just because? If you go to the actual Florida webpage containing those screenshots, there's a big disclaimer:
DISCLAIMER: Based on the volume of requests the Department has received for examples of problematic elements of the recently reviewed instructional materials, the following are examples provided to the department by the public and presented no conflict in sharing them. These examples do not represent an exhaustive list of input received by the Department.
The implication is that the examples are whatever the fuck people sent in, not samples from a documented review process. Also, the disclaimer is posted twice, the second time below the examples, showing a good grasp of both arithmetic and geometry on the part of whoever made the page.
121- I could Google it but I think it roughly breaks down that A is fundamental definitions of calculus (limits, core theorems), B is single variable calculus (derivatives, integrals) and C is multi variable calculus (partial derivatives, multiple integrals, maybe transforms?)
123-"I'm a statistician-ish person and I don't understand the reason beyond "game college admissions." A bunch of other advanced high school courses (AP physics, chem, bio) integrate (haha) calculus. Mechanics, magnetic fields, chemical rate equations, molecular orbital theory, enzyme kinetics.
Point being that if you do AB then BC you're repeating the single variable stuff like basic rules for derivatives/integrals of common equations.
136: you're repeating the single variable stuff
Which wouldn't be that bad for most students in actuality.
I took AB lo these many years ago (it was quite rare to have offered in public schools in my area back then), discovered my huge gaps in actual understanding during Linear Algebra and Diff Eq my freshmen, and actually came to really learn it while tutoring Calc starting 2nd semester Freshman year.
I forbade my kid from taking the Stats AP test after the course lest he or his college counselor would be tempted to skip a Intro Stats in college. Course was a bit of a joke from what I could see.
Statistics should be saved for marriage or graduate school.
Something that's life changing and has a big chance of ending in failure.
Depends. Marriage is probably safer.
To get higher confidence on the likelihood of failure you should get married and go to grad school at least three times.
135.2: How is that not another way of saying "game college admissions"?
Kids might actually find learning those things useful or interesting? Similar to 129, when I learned that forced physical oscillators could be modeled with analog circuits, or that the weird shapes of molecular orbitals that you learn are actually defined by logical equations, I was like holy shit. (Those were college not HS but needed the calculus foundation to learn it.)
I had an awesome freshman physics TA who unfortunately also turned out to be harassing female students.
133: On the other hand, people seem puzzled why more Black women don't go into STEM fields. That being the case, would a math book that engages Black girl students with content they can positively relate to really be the worst thing in the world
We can do much better than just entertaining ideas against the rubric "is this not the worst idea in the world?" For example, there is considerable evidence that women hold themselves to a much higher bar than men do when deciding if they are qualified to pursue a STEM career, so that is one target for intervention. There is also evidence that college Calc I destroys the math confidence of many students, even many who have taken AP Calc and performed decently; this indicates that many students are not being properly prepared in HS and that taking HS calculus is not an end in itself and strong foundational preparation is critical. At the same time, college calculus courses suffer from having much more compressed timeframes and larger class sizes than HS courses, so delaying calculus to college is also not an end in itself. Black students have considerably less access to accelerated courses than white students do, which affects access to STEM careers as well. Representation clearly matters too (actual representation, like black teachers and scientists, not random Maya Angelou references next to algebra problems).
In general, education reformers are overwhelmingly focused on reducing disparities *within* public schools and are thus probably actively undermining equity in higher education and STEM careers by treating high math achievement as suspect and pushing rigorous math preparation into the private sector. If your key thesis is that the very notion of "talent" is responsible for racial inequality, you are not going to nurture and develop talent in black girls, and if those girls don't have parents with resources, they will be held back.
To be clear his teaching was awesome, he turned out to not be an awesome persone.
There's probably someone who is interested in the etchings too.
God I hate Russian math schools but I guess that's cool now.
133: Aren't you excluding a category of things that are almost certainly harmless even if possibly not pedagogically important, and don't seem to be crowding out anything more important? Little biographies of black mathematicians in a math textbook, or word problems written for social relevance (I'd agree that, if it's real, a textbook shouldn't have students graphing data on how racist conservatives are, regardless of how obviously true it is) seem as though they might make some students feel more comfortable and included, and don't seem to me to interfere at all with the other issues you raise.
152: that sounds entirely reasonable to me.
"I'd agree that, if it's real, a textbook shouldn't have students graphing data on how racist conservatives are, regardless of how obviously true it is"
See, this is why Democrats lose. DeSantis' team probably has a textbook under development asking kids to calculate how many pictures of naked kids were on Hunter Biden's laptop if each image is 4MB and the disk size is 128 GB.
Seems context dependent. I'm skeptical that the everyone keeping race at the forefront of their minds is very effective at making racial minorities comfortable.
147: I had him as well. Very disappointed by the later revelations, though I don't know if he was harassing female students before the Wild West of the MOOC/e-learning stuff. Everything I heard about was online skeeziness.
My kid's school district is rejiggering its math in the way described in 116 (I'm sure SP knows all about this), and I have a lot of science/nerdy friends and parents who are up in arms about it, but I have not managed to get into it enough to decide if I'm outraged or want to try to do anything about it before my kid is in high school.
My connection does elementary math curriculum so I actually haven't heard much about HS although I'm sure I could get opinions about that too.
Aren't you excluding a category of things that are almost certainly harmless even if possibly not pedagogically important, and don't seem to be crowding out anything more important?
I think I'm trying to include that category, rather than exclude it. Certainly biographies of mathematicians could be a positive inclusion.
Unfortunately, the history of mathematics being what it is, there are a lot more white mathematician biographies than Black mathematician biographies out there to choose from. The same people are going to complain when you have a biography of Katherine Johnson but skip René Descartes.
Nobody has ever explained "data science" to me, but that might be because I've never admitted I don't know.
Remember how, back in the day, people used to major in physics and then go straight into working for a hedge fund? It's that, without having to study physics.
Nobody has ever explained "data science" to me
It's not all old wine in new bottles--
There are some methodological innovations, and some formerly niche methods that have gained prominence recently. Basically, cheap computing and storage are behind proliferation of high-dimensional problems, which were not part of the standard statistics curriculum. Cosma Shalizi has written some nice essays about this.
I didn't even study statistics much. Like five classes.
Exactly 5, except that's counting one class I took twice.
I never had any idea of 135.1. Our AP Calc class* covered all of the material A-C, but the teacher individually advised kids on which test to take, while the regular calc course only taught AB. I'm pretty sure I still think this approach makes sense.
Architects were required to take calc (bc you need it for structural calculations), but I AP'd out, and that was the only math required. So I last took a math course 32 years ago. I enjoyed tutoring Iris on stuff, but some of it was at my fingertips while other bits were like going back to square one. She took Stats instead of Calc this year.
*very good teacher, universally understood to be the most challenging & rigorous class at the school. Maybe 12 of us, while Honors Algebra 2 had more like 25.
Everyone went to fancy high schools but me.
Nah, I went to a public high school in a district where people move because of the "good schools" but the offerings were pretty slim. No BC calc, no AP physics of either type, no stats class. I took every science class they offered which shouldn't be possible if there's a diverse range of classes. It was pretty clear that "good schools" meant "mostly white students from wealthy families."
I didn't even know what "AP" meant except "Associated Press." My physics class was me and one other student.
What does the academic literature on school socialization in general look like? Are there a variety of strategies taught to educators and attempts to measure outcomes? Or is it just broadly assumed that you can't do better than just tossing a bunch of same age children into the pot and letting them sort it out?
I could Google it but I think it roughly breaks down that A is fundamental definitions of calculus (limits, core theorems), B is single variable calculus (derivatives, integrals) and C is multi variable calculus (partial derivatives, multiple integrals, maybe transforms?)
Also haven't googled, but I thought both were single-variable - ie Cal 1 and 2 - and just differed on depth.
168: do you mean the literature on social-emotional learning? there's a ton, and I actually think the implementation in our district at least has been good. (At the elementary school level. Everything falls apart when kids stop being cute.)
168: do you mean the literature on social-emotional learning? there's a ton, and I actually think the implementation in our district at least has been good. (At the elementary school level. Everything falls apart when kids stop being cute.)
Like with the kids from Different Strokes.
Holy shit, Gary Coleman is dead? I had no idea.
I guess that's why he hasn't been in the news for some time now.
I'm remembering something dramatic involving the hood of a car, but not necessarily a car crash. I'd better go google.
I guess I made that up.
But from his wikipedia page:
Coleman was an avid railroad fan, and he later worked part-time at Denver-area, Tucson-area, and California hobby stores to be around his hobby.[8][9] Coleman built and maintained miniature railroads in his homes in several states throughout the 1990s. Currently, at least one of Coleman's model railroads is being preserved in Colorado Springs, Colorado.[10]
That is so sweet.
The biggest educational problem comes from asshats who don't monitor road width and get stuck blocking bridges while hauling a fucking swimming pool across a key bridge affecting traffic between parents and the school.
Unless they empty the water out of the pool its going to be too heavy for that bridge.
But I guess a lot of it probably sloshed out already.
I think it's a new pool, never even been peed in.
Maybe a few people peed in it, but not enough to change the weight appreciably.
Also haven't googled, but I thought both were single-variable - ie Cal 1 and 2 - and just differed on depth.
This is my memory from having taken them. There was never any discussion of what, if anything, the letters meant.
The College Board confirms. The first eight units are identical then BC adds units on parametric equations and infinite series. Nothing multivariable.
169- You're right, BC is single variable and parametric functions and series. There's another class at our HS that's post-BC that kid might take which is why I was thinking multivariable:
This course covers differential, integral and vector calculus for functions of more than one variable, including the following topics: vector-valued functions; parameterized curves and surfaces; vector fields; partial derivatives and gradients; optimization; method of Lagrange multipliers; integration over regions in R2 and R3; integration over curves
and surfaces; Green's theorem, Stokes's theorem, Divergence theorem. These topics and methods are used extensively in the physical sciences, engineering, economics and computer graphics. All topics identified in a typical university multivariable calculus course will be addressed. There is no AP exam associated with this course. This is a demanding course designed for motivated students who have taken AP Calculus BC or AB and gotten a 3 or higher on their AP exam or with teacher recommendation. Grades: 11, 12 Pre-Reqs: A B+ or higher in one of the following courses: AP Calc AB/BC or Honors Calc OR a 3 or higher on their AP exam or with teacher recommendation if student earned a passing grade lower than B
Uh oh. Schools are using Covid relief funds to push core tenets of critical race theory (CRT).
What are those core tenets? " 'Implicit bias' and 'anti-racism' training." So it's come to this: Schools are now asking our children to recognize implicit bias and -- even worse -- coming out flatly against racism.
Scandalously, the New York state Education Department "also recommended that schools use social-emotional learning [SEL] to "support the work of anti-racism and anti-bias."
It's a long article, and it's all like that. There is literally nothing to this scandal beyond the fact that schools are discouraging racism.
Racism really does help many people. They'd need to find new jobs if the schools succeed.
Woke liberal math replaces BC with a BCE series. Multiple axes instead of just two, partial instead of impartial fractions, complex numbers (can you even imagine that?), bi- and polynomial forms of expression, it's all out there for the world to see.
Schools are using Covid relief funds to push core tenets of critical race theory (CRT).
Our state education department is using Covid relief funds to pay a private company to buy Facebook ads marketing their e-learning-based replacement for public schools.
186: the article is relying on the presumption that the anti-racism stuff is bad, but the other key point is that this is being paid for out of emergency "life-and-death" ARP funds.
And having gone down some rabbit holes due to some local education nonsense... I have to say, when liberals all agree that the stain of racism is so deep that anythng wrapped in a DEI flag is necessarily beyond reproach, you end up with an army of not-so-bright grifters riding a gravy train. It's true that this sounds like a caricature of a conservative fever dream, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. But I didn't realize this personally until I discovered that my local school administrators genuinely wanted to remove calculus from the curriculum, in a wealthy, mostly white district where most kids currently take calculus in HS.
Maybe I'm wrong, and this website isn't relying on anti-racism as a shield to try to push through ridiculously questionable educational practices.
Btw, teachers should certainly be thoughtful and reflective about assumptions they're making about their students, but the evidence that "implicit bias" is correlated with biased behavior is weak to nonexistent. It is the type of pop psychology concept that people love though, because it doesn't blame anyone for our problems and provides a path forward that just relies on positive thinking (see also grit, growth mindset).
165: I can absolutely assure you that I didn't go to a fancy high school. We had some AP classes (Calculus, English), but it also had something like 2,500 students.
So your graduating class wouldn't fit in a short school bus? Fancy.
We didn't have an elevator that went to the second floor, but we did have a student who used a wheelchair. She was carried up and down by other students.
Except neither of those existed then.
I've never taken (or learned) any calculus. I'd taken enough other math classes (statistics? And something very focused on matrices) that I'd fulfilled the requirement before my senior year and there was some scheduling issue so I did the other thing (probably art or music) instead.
Then in college the requirement was 2 years of math or a foreign language and I wanted to learn French.
Let's have a reading group where I teach everyone Calculus.
Let's have a reading group where I locate my grandmother's old calculus textbook that she bought with the ambition of teaching herself calculus in the 30s but never read, and we fulfill her dream.
197: That would be awesome! I've taken Calculus a few times. First as a senior in high school - I think I dropped out, rather than fail. Then I took a Basic Calculus class as a freshman. It was a math class for humanities majors, and I aced it. Then at some point in my confused college career, I thought that maybe I should major in computer science and so I took the beginning Calculus class for math and science majors. I did ok, but I always had the feeling that I wasn't really getting it.
Maybe I should resolve to learn calculus before I turn 60.