Culture

SJWs Coming For Mathematics

Stream: SJWs Coming For Mathematics

Great news! For those kids who will be taught math by teachers graduating from Texas State University’s Math Education program, life just got easier.

This is bound to be confusing, so keep this fact in mind. Universities hire Math Education professors, whose job is to train primary and secondary education math teachers. Have it?

According to the not-unusual official want-ad, Texas State University is looking for math education professorial candidates

… who share our commitment to educational equity, to social justice, and to the recruitment and high-quality education of students from historically underserved and systemically marginalized communities. We are especially interested in applicants whose scholarly interests and work include attention to the concerns of race, ethnicity, multilingualism, immigrant, social class, gender, and diversity, broadly defined.

∫ ex dx = white privilege

Social-Justice-Warrior-minded professors whose job is to train future math teachers will thus be hired.

Instead of prospective math teachers learning from these professors the best ways to impart that the indefinite integral of the tangent of x with respect to x equals the negative log of the absolute value of the cosine of x, plus a constant, they might instead be taught that Leibniz and Newton, the inventors of the calculus, were white Christian men. And were therefore probability racist and sexist and can be ignored.

That’s only partly a joke.

Inequality ≠ injustice

Why are SJWs coming for math? Because just as everybody cannot be a professional basketball player, it turns out not everybody can learn math equally well. But SJWs insist that everybody must, and that any “disparities” in learning must be caused by social injustice.

Yet just as everybody cannot be over fix feet tall, not everybody has the same facility with math. Some are better at it, some worse. Some are better because of innate talent and industriousness, and some are better because circumstance allows them to use their talents.

But there is no evidence except desire that everybody can learn math equally well, even under identical circumstances. Equity is desired, as the ad says, but it will never be reached.

Sometimes ∑ males > ∑ females

Math class, as Barbie rightly said, is tough. That toughness is why official groups of math education specialists fret that “mathematics achievement…measured by standardized tests, has been used as a gatekeeping tool to sort and rank students”.

This ranking often shows “disparities” in “race, class, and gender”. And that is politically unacceptable.

There are only two things that can be done to remove these “disparities”. The first is obvious: have under-performing students study harder whilst improving their studying circumstances. Much money and effort were spent applying this praiseworthy method. Yet certain “disparities” persisted, and some became especially glaring at advanced levels.

Mathematics ∉ my culture

This lead to the second erasure method: redefine what mathematics means.

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If you believe 2 + 2 is not culturally dependent, click here.

Categories: Culture, Statistics

9 replies »

  1. According to the most recent population survey released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor, the teaching gender gap is still alive and well. Male educators constitute just 2.3% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers, 18.3% of the elementary and middle school teacher population, and 42% of the high school level teaching staff. These numbers are down from 2007, but suggest a clear female majority in the teaching profession, especially in the earlier grades. https://www.aaeteachers.org/index.php/blog/757-the-teacher-gender-gap

    The ratio of females to males who were awarded master’s degrees in elementary and secondary education at Texas State University during the past decade is about 5:1. Presumably the ratio holds for the segment who wanted to teach math.

    Oh, the Inequality!

    As for math education, Winnie Cooper steps up. http://www.mathdoesntsuck.com/

  2. There’s still hope. Set Theory is very inclusive, and is the modern theorethical foundation of Arithmetic.

  3. Math is flexible. As Pete Townshend so eloquently put it:

    In life one and one don’t make two
    One and one make one

  4. I hope you maths people aren’t fretting too hard. I’m sure those who continue doing real maths will continue to succeed and those who change it won’t. Eventually, when the money runs out they will dwindle. ‘simples.’

    Barbarian philosophy is shallow. Cindesean philosophical thinkers are deep.
    Cindy was much prettier and better at gymnastics and ballet. They put her on a skin and bone diet so her shape approached Barbie’s.
    LET CINDY GO.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJvmHjtkmkc

    Barbie didn’t like maths, she preferred shopping. She always bought shoes in the sale because she was only a size three as opposed to the practically average, size five. I wonder if Barbie’s had a tattoo, hmmm, I wonder…bet her new belly button’s pierced.

    I strongly resisted an urge to write about my first and only Cindy, a ballerina.
    Neither cast ye pearls and all that…

    I’ve been watching yea math for a revision of what some will say is baby maths but some of us have different reasons for being interested in learning than others. This is lost on some, many, philosophy groovers!

  5. Everybody knows that Newton (and leibnitz) invented the calculus just to confuse and befuddle women and minorities. And look at what Gauss did, he wrote in Latin to make math even more difficult. It’s only fair that the schools simplify math so it doesn’t have an adverse impact on women and minorities.

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