And maybe the parents won’t notice.
So, apparently, there’s an “intersection of mathematics and social justice.” In fact, there’s an entire six-week teacher-training course devoted to this hitherto unrecognised intersection and its propagation among middle-school children, i.e., the young and unsuspecting. Especially, of course, the “social justice” part:
Do you ask students to think deeply about global and local social justice issues within your mathematics classroom? This education and teacher training course will help you blend secondary math instruction with topics such as inequity, poverty, and privilege to transform students into global thinkers and mathematicians.
Yes, students will be transformed.
As Campus Reform’s Toni Airaksinen reports,
Participants in the online course are given sample ideas for lessons they could create, such as using math to teach students about “Unpaid Work Hours in the Home by Gender” and “Race and Imprisonment Rates in the United States.”
Loaded insinuations are so much easier to get away with when you’re dealing with impressionable youngsters.
The module also identifies five main themes of “intersectional mathematics,” including “mathematical ethics,” which refers to the notion that math is often used as a tool of oppression, according to the instructors. “For centuries, mathematics has been used as a dehumanising tool,” they write, citing the example of how IQ can be used against people who score in the lower half of the distribution.
And so children – other people’s children – must be taught to “subvert power, question normalcy, and change society as we understand it.” When, strictly speaking, they should be learning about more humdrum things, like geometry, trigonometry and spatial reasoning.
And if you assume that shame alone will stop such people, or give them pause, even momentarily, I very much think you’re wrong.
She doesn’t strike me as someone naturally inclined to stoicism or gratitude.
Indeed, that the white supremacist patriarchy has granted a wymxn of color a doctorate in mathematics, which is not exactly what a real white supremacist patriarchy would allow, seems to have escaped her. Also it is rather curious that one who rails so much about cis-males has not only married one, but taken his name, and had sprogs with him. Very cis- of her and and not very “progressive” on her part.
Indeed,
Of the people I’ve met and had exchanges with who, as it were, went to Social Justice Charm School, almost all of them had the same blind spot. In that, they didn’t seem willing (or able) to connect their own pronouncements and behaviour with any subsequent rejection or disappointment. They seemed to go through life being, to varying degrees, obnoxious, and when people around them took exception to their behaviour or simply ignored them, this was seized upon as somehow validating their pronouncements and obnoxious behaviour.
…which is not exactly what a real white supremacist patriarchy would allow,…
In fairness, the White Supremacist Patriarchy did have this failing on the agenda for last month’s meeting–fourth Tuesday of the month @ 7:00 PM in the Fellowship Hall of the Zion Lutheran Church (LCMS), Beulah, North Dakota–but the meeting was cancelled inasmuch as it conflicted with the WSM’s obligation to finally trip the hedge and then take the kids to the elementary school musical, “What Would We Do Without Trees?” We’ll get to it next week.
“Global thinkers” first
Yes, Godlike, all-knowing beings hovering over every issue dispensing their wisdom and bike locks whenever necessary, granting permission to think and speak to other, unenlightened, less-worthy, misguided
scumindividuals.Yes, Godlike, all-knowing beings
It’s what “social justice” activism does. It seduces the credulous with flattery and in-group status, and promises endless opportunities to scold out-group inferiors. The Chosen Ones will be “change agents” and “enlightened leaders,” remaking the world in their own glorious image.
And no-one likes feeling superior, and scolding, more than a self-declared egalitarian.
Let’s for the sake of argument (and amusement) act as if these are substantive claims other than ravings. Outside that, she’s made several rather hilarious lapses here. First, a confusion between reward and award (in her rush to use a recognized idiom), which undermines her whole idea. Madam should note that a reward is a recognition received for doing a thing, often without any sense of excellence. What is due. An *award* is received for excellence. She has here permitted suggestion that she has no excellence, only a debt to claim. Grievance. I understand that notional denial of “recognition” as well as “awards” would permit a category for this, but even if we assumed that a *reward* had been due, it is not a plus other than suggesting a completely hearsay diligence.
Furthermore, if it “is its own reward”, then why does it count as something denied? This sort of passive aggressive self-contradiction should be a warning bell to anyone at all. It’s “I’m fine” and a transparently nursed grudge writ large. An indication that this person both holds grudges and grandstands on the moral value of their own mistreatment – as if the rest weren’t an indication of that, but if one small item were a summary of reasons not to hire, that’s it.
To bring up the recognition and excellence elision again, exactly how many people searching for a position will *not* have “experienced village-less parenthood”? Or “patriarchy”, within her definitions, or “white supremacy”? Even assuming all her points, none of these set her apart from large elements of society – surely the percentages would be something like 80%, 50%, and as much as 40% or more. This is not a unique selling point for her because it is not unique. The equivalent of knowing how to web search on a resume – not excellence, certainly.
I humbly submit that even within the bounds of total delusion, she is inept at reason. If we’re to have Social Justice Maths, we shall need to find a more reasonable mad person.
“mathematics and social justice”
This is quintessentially totalitarian: Everything must be made to serve the Party and its ideology. Those who push these programs are, no matter their protestations of benevolence, enemies of our civilization.
@Nikw211: There is a real travesty buried there. Related to the oft-described Looks Exotic, Thinks Exactly Like Us phenomenon. The following:
is a grand and noble-sounding statement, but how often is it in practice anything other than “identify cultural group, coo over exoticness and spirituality, identify their “oppressor” in a Marxist dialectic, be infernal nuisance while claiming advocacy for them”?
The phrase “comprehend other people’s thoughts, beliefs and feelings” is code for “be sure to find an ‘oppressed’ culture to visit as a theme park, completely fail to understand it in anything but Marxist shallowness, and blame Whitey”.
In other words, it preemptively sets an obstacle to true cultural understanding – by design.
Off-topic slightly, but I have to share a refreshing stand against indoctrination by Don Boudreaux of Café Hayek:
Hurrah! Bravo, sir! Here in the middle of our second major election in as many months, with career politicians rampaging around the country spouting their various Schemes for ordering us around (and looking out of my window to a massive “VOTE GREEN” poster across the street, gawd ‘elp us) , it brought a tear to my eye.
believing both that they are fit to order others about and that such commandeering of the lives of others is noble rather than nefarious.
Quite.
Check out her CV:
CV as Performance Art. Clever girl. Beats carrying a mattress around.
Much more impressively padded, too.
http://www.theliberatedmathematician.com/2016/05/hire-me/
David, shall we bookmark her? If the Every Day Feminism site closes maybe her blog can fill in some of the gaps?
“…..All I can say is that I will be on the job market. And many women and people of color and other marginalized people will be on the job market, if they make it that far. The system is biased against us.”
From her post she gets a reply
“…I don’t claim to understand the difficulty of being a woman in academia, nor the difficulty of not being white.
I do have some questions though: considering that the academic job market is made of N positions and 1000*N applicants, how can you rationally ascribe your difficulties to a matter of race and gender, when you are the first to say that you don’t have a CV that stands out? Someone was hired for those positions that you applied for: are you sure that you deserved those positions more than all other candidates?…..”
She replies
“You can’t qualify away a sexist and racist argument with “I don’t claim to understand”s and “I don’t deny”s. Riddle me this, why aren’t there more women and people of color in math if not for sexism and racism? Spell it out for me. Your answer will either be “sexism and racism” or your answer will be sexist and racist. Beware of the whiteness and cis het maleness inherent in what passes for “objectivity.””
We do then get a
“There are *a lot* of Asians in math, so racism can’t be the only reason. Regarding the gender disparity, many women I talk to say, that they want to be able to do something that matters, so that understandably disqualifies pure math as a field of interest for them.”
For crying out loud! Maths is maths: it’s a discipline strictly based on valid proofs. It has no connotation whatsoever with social justice.
If school kids were able to operate at Bertrand Russell levels, then yes. In practice you are wrong, because school Maths is largely about semi-practical applications of simple operations. Those operations almost invariably involve some context — and have done since long before SJWs burst on the scene.
As a teacher of Maths you have to choose examples. You can sub-let that out to a textbook, but even that’s a choice. So my students are endlessly calculating how fast they mow if a 10 m by 12 m garden takes them 25 minutes (not exactly a “discipline based on valid proofs”). And as we move on to statistics I get them to plot hotel room accommodation over time.
Each time I select an example I am saying something about what I think. If I only pick examples that relate to males — loads of rugby and engineering and cars — then I risk alienating girls. One reason I am a fan of single sex teaching btw.
Now I make an effort to choose examples as unladen with social justice (or social anything or anything justice) as possible because I want them to focus on the Maths involved. And I fight online with teachers that say we should use “meaningful” examples — because I believe that 1) it isn’t our job, 2) the quality of Maths falls, because the wrong things become the focus, and 3) students will end up disliking your class if they dislike your politics. But that is a deliberate choice on my part, and people who don’t make that choice will inevitably end up saying something about social issues.
It’s quite different at University, where I studied whole courses without a single “real world” example.
Just telling high school Maths teachers that their subject should be value free isn’t very helpful. If they agree with you then, in practice, what they are doing is teaching their views implicitly and thinking that they are above that — as if anyone is above having views that taint their world. What is also not helpful is deliberately trying to make the subject another branch of humanities.
or your answer will be sexist and racist
Because there’s no possibility that differential selective pressure on primates over the past several millions of years has led to different cognitive ability distributions between the sexes…
I would abase myself, but I find that I just don’t care to do so:-D.
And I fight online with teachers that say we should use “meaningful” examples
Like the ones found here?
I would abase myself
That should’ve been “denounce”. I’m tired. Still don’t care though:-D.
Regarding the gender disparity, many women I talk to say, that they want to be able to do something that matters, so that understandably disqualifies pure math as a field of interest for them.”
FFFS, I currently work for a cyber security company. We are about to (hopefully) hire a woman data scientist into our all male (except for the admin assistant) small company. To say that math doesn’t matter and thus not a thing for women at a time when data science is all the rage (though over sold, admittedly)….f’ it. I’ve run out of patience with these idiots. It’s not like any conceivable logical argument would matter as all logic and science is #PATRIARCHY. It’s as if these fools read the racist and sexist objections to civil rights and equal rights argued by the likes of Strom Thurmond and worse back in the 1950’s and 1960’s and decided to adopt those bigoted perceptions as reality.
Sigh…perhaps it’s all a troll…
Oh, and the amusing thing about this woman data scientist who is coming over from academia….She’s interested in our company, so I’m told, partly because she feels she’s getting ignored in the academic world due to (possibly just perceived but I’m willing to give her benefit of the doubt) sexism.
As a teacher of Maths you have to choose examples.
One of the reasons I prefer to tutor, and adults, is that they already have a job and it’s not hard for me to give them problems that are similar to what they do every day.
I’ll leave another feminist link, as we worry of the demise of Everyday Feminism.
http://www.refinery29.com/2017/05/154866/handmaids-tale-hulu-timing-review-mary-mccarthy
Self-congratulation and scaremongering bleed together in right-thinking feminist’s Elena Nicolaou’s review-of-a-review of The Handmaid’s Tale. It seems that a female reviewer in 1986, just after the novel’s publication, was just mad to have suggested that America was unlikely to turn into a prison state for women.
Carefully unmentioned by Ms. Nicolaou are the prison states for women which do exist on this Earth.
Reminds me of Challenge Math: https://youtu.be/McvYu2e2zkw
…comprehend other people’s thoughts, beliefs and feelings, and see the world from their perspectives…
Isn’t that the purpose of fiction? And isn’t that precisely what’s wrong with the concept of “cultural appropriation?”
And isn’t that precisely what’s wrong with the concept of “cultural appropriation?”
Not the only thing wrong with it, obviously…
Oh, and the amusing thing about this woman data scientist who is coming over from academia….She’s interested in our company, so I’m told, partly because she feels she’s getting ignored in the academic world due to (possibly just perceived but I’m willing to give her benefit of the doubt) sexism.
WTP, will you keep us up to date on the lawsuit she inevitably files against your company?
Adiabat,
Yeah…but the thing is, she will be critical in making us successful. If we’re not successful, there’s no money to sue us for. If we are successful, there will be plenty of money to go around. She does have a successful track record on the edges of academia/business. And given what hypocrites (and I never use that word lightly) that the academic world is, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s right. It’s not like she made an issue of it or mentioned it at all in the interview I was in. More like something inferred.
More from Piper, the mathematical prodigy:
http://i.imgur.com/VGGLsl7.png
Mere males should not be allowed to discuss my work!