Academia Problematic Competence

But Paying Attention Is Hard

January 21, 2025 by David 9 Comments

Toni Airaksinen pokes a stick at some contrived agonising: 

Math classes cause “intellectual trauma” to minorities. 

This “intellectual trauma” is, you’ll be shocked to hear, entirely the fault of “whiteness” and “heteromasculinity.”

A group of educators has published a guide on implementing “Black Feminist Mathematical Pedagogies” in classrooms, arguing that such an approach is necessary because minorities – especially Black girls – face “violence and trauma” in math education.

As we’re in the realm of the excruciatingly woke, the terms violence and trauma are of course misused and deliberately misleading.

“When Black female students are repeatedly disciplined for being social, loud, or goofy in the mathematics classroom, they experience mathematical violence,” claim the authors of Designing Mathematics Curricula That Centre Students’ Brilliance.

The supposed violence and trauma, then, is actually an attempt to excuse rates of classroom misbehaviour among black students.

Throughout the paper in question, the term “brilliance” is deployed no fewer than seventeen times, as if it were some obviously inherent, pre-existing attribute – of students who can’t be arsed to study, who don’t pay attention in class, and whose grades, as a result, leave much to be desired.

The research team – including Lara Jasien, Michael Lolkus, doctoral student Marlena Eanes Snowden, and Dr Leslie Dietiker of Wheelock College – contends that while many believe math is politically neutral, it is actually “steeped in whiteness and heteromasculinity.”

And furthermore,

“Whiteness is a global phenomenon, impacting marginalised students and communities… and mathematics curricula are saturated in whiteness.”

Saturated, you hear. Positively dripping with the stuff.

The academics assert that “whiteness” is pervasive in math classes and curriculum structures, explicitly stating: “As a culture, whiteness is toxic in society and in education. More specifically, in society, whiteness presents through norms including – but not limited to – perfectionism, a sense of urgency, individualism, and objectivity.”

So, to paraphrase our fretful educators: Among these allegedly downtrodden and traumatised minority students, expectations of promptness and accuracy, of arriving at correct and verifiable answers, and handing work in on time, are alien things. Instead, it seems, we get lots of loud and goofy behaviour. Thereby disrupting attempts to learn by other, more conscientious students.

And which, it has to be said, isn’t entirely flattering of the drama’s supposed victims, or an obvious basis for sympathy, even pretentious sympathy. Nor is it an obvious footing for some sweeping, de-whitened reinvention of how mathematical knowledge might be imparted. All conjured into being at the expense of those more diligent and whose classroom behaviour isn’t selfish and disruptive.

They argue that these cultural values place an “additional burden” on minority students, making them feel unwelcome and alienated in math classrooms.

Well, again, if a student doesn’t feel obliged to do the work, to learn, or to hand in said work by a given deadline, like everyone else, and instead spends class time pissing about, loudly, then being unwelcome seems an inevitable consequence of those choices.

And constructing elaborate, question-begging excuses for such behaviour, as if these inadequacies were somehow proof of obscured “brilliance,” things to which one should defer, and actively affirm, doesn’t strike me as a convincing, long-term solution. Indeed, it sounds rather… what’s the word? Oh yes, toxic.

The authors repeatedly describe math education as a space of “violence” for minority students: “Making students feel unwelcome and incompetent alienates them in mathematics class and contributes to intellectual trauma and violence in mathematical spaces.”

Readers will note how any feelings of incompetence and not being welcome are immediately blamed on external causes, on some ectoplasmic “whiteness,” that Befouler Of All Things. As if such feelings had nothing whatsoever to do with the choices and behaviour, and the personal shortcomings, of the students themselves.

Instead, Dr Jasien and her colleagues expect the teaching of mathematics to be driven by the goal of “healing… intellectual trauma,” by paying “attention to the minds and bodies of students.” The students being, it seems, much less obliged to pay attention to anything beyond themselves.

Update, via the comments:

Somewhat related:

Casey Griffin, a professor at the University of Delaware… argues that women’s sense of belonging in math is hindered by values such as ‘objective’ and ‘rational thought.’

As so, with eye-widening obliviousness, those who claim to champion certain supposedly downtrodden demographics do a disservice to those same demographics.

It’s a pattern we’ve seen before, of course:

The leader of Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education recently declared that academic “rigour” reinforces “white male heterosexual privilege.” “One of rigour’s purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality,” she writes, explaining that rigour “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations — and links to masculinity in particular — are undeniable.”

Hardness and stiffness. And we can’t have any of that beastliness in the minds of people who may one day be working on projects involving cranes and scaffolding. According to Dr Donna Riley, whose words glow above, academic rigour and the expectation of competence are “exclusionary” and tools of “privilege,” and are unfair to women and minorities, for whom rigour and competence are presumably impossible.

Dr Riley goes on to inform us that engineers need to spend less time doing load-bearing calculations, and more time pondering “radical protest” and “Marxist traditions.” Yes, the design and construction of fighter jets, oil rigs and 1000-tonne tunnelling machines will one day be informed not by careful calculation, or a knowledge of materials and thoroughly tested principles, but by criticality, reflexivity, and “other ways of being.”

Via CavScoutCoastie.




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