Academia The Thrill Of Endless Noise

But Paying Attention Is Hard

January 21, 2025 by David 169 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, who undermine the efforts of others, and whose grades, as a result, leave much to be desired.

Even more frequent is use of the term “whiteness,” an alleged phenomenon on which the paper is premised. Though readers in search of some clear and convincing definition, or some compelling evidence of its existence, may find their hopes dashed. We are, however, assured that “whiteness” is something that gets in the way of black students “maintaining their Blackness.”

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.

And so, we’re told that “exclamations” and “cacophony” are “to be both expected and valued.” Because when you picture a maths classroom and people getting to grips with differential equations or vector calculus, the first thing that springs to mind is the word cacophony.

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.”

Update 2: 

Regarding Dr Jasien and her colleagues, Aelfheld adds,

More and more it seems an entire industry has dedicated itself to reinforcing, in contrived and convoluted language, often at book length, the most denigrating racist jokes of the past century or so.

Ah, but, you see, Our Betters will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.

I’m reminded, for instance, of assistant professor of art education, Dr Albert Stabler, who regards objections to being assaulted in class as “white supremacist violence” – because objecting to violence is violence now – while excusing a near-continual disruption of lessons as displays of “cultural knowledge” and “kinetic” creativity. A creativity that includes vandalism, punching staff, and forcibly cutting the hair of female teachers.

On grounds that expecting even minimally civilised behaviour is “the overvaluation of white feelings,” and therefore “racist.”

And note that those peddling this worldview, this poisonous counsel, can get quite annoyed when minority students don’t want to play along.

Update 3:

Regarding Dr Jasien’s insistence that the rest of us embrace the value of gratuitous, unending, rather loud background noise, Finno adds,

Disrupting other people’s concentration is being anti-social. To pretend that the disrupters are engaging with the material in a vibrant misunderstood way adds insult to injury for the demoralised students and teachers who have to put up with it.

It’s hard to see the mannered outpourings of Dr Jasien and her colleagues as anything other than a perverse, contrived inversion, in which those inflicting the disruption and “cacophony” on others are to be pampered and indulged, as if they were the victims of their own self-inflicted drama – around whom, all else must be made to revolve. Their selfishness, their disregard for others, is something to be affirmed and championed, it seems.

Because magic blackness.

And this is advanced as obviously desirable, an unassailable course of action. As “social justice.” As if it imposed no cost on others, over and over again. But I suspect that my attempts to master multivariate calculus would be somewhat impaired, or made entirely impossible, by lots of nearby shrieking and general arsing about.

Oh, and see also this, in which Ms Xochitl Gonzalez, a columnist for the Atlantic – and who repeatedly mentions how “minority” and “of colour” she is – is mystified and annoyed by people who don’t appreciate loud hip-hop in a university library. Where other people, better people, are trying to study for exams.

Via CavScoutCoastie.

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