Back in the 1940s when I started to learn math the material was a combination of dense and rote. You started to know the integers, then addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, and then the infamous word problems. I recall the 3rd grade with Mrs Hill and the horrible math book. It had thousands of examples to work through. I had gotten the concept but why do 100 divisions each night! I had other stuff to do. Math was like penance, saying 100 Hail Marys etc. I found out a way around it. Mrs. Hill just looked to see if you has written answers and she never checked to see if it was correct. Neatness counted. So I just neatly put in number that I thought looked close and got straight full credit. I learned how to smartly guess and give the teacher what she wanted.
Now as math increased in complexity it suddenly burst out from behind the "numbers" to the concepts in my Junior year of High School. I rapidly left my class mates behind as I studied calculus, non-Euclidean Geometry, tensors and other new things that intrigued me.
At no time did I have to consider the socio-political implications of 2+2. Along comes the article in the NY Times about First Grade texts in Florida. They note:
In most of the books, there was little that touched on race, never mind an academic framework like critical race theory.But many of the textbooks included social-emotional learning content, a practice with roots in psychological research that tries to help students develop mind-sets that can support academic success.The image below, from marketing materials provided by the company Big Ideas Learning — whose elementary textbooks Florida rejected — features one common way teachers are trained to think about social-emotional learning.
So if I am asked what 9+5 is equal to, and all I know is 9+1, do I get credit, partial credit. Is it some different ethnic/racial/gender variant? So if 9+1 is 10, then 10+1 is 11 and so forth. That is an algorithmic way to get to the final answer. Is this the New New Math, that Venn diagram nonsense of the early to mid 70s? Or is it an excuse for poor learning.
There are many ways to solve a math problem, that frankly is the beauty of math. Yet there is always a right answer. Right in the context of using the rules. Namely mathematicians have the allowed rules or techniques so that others can validate a proof. One can assemble them in a variety of ways and still have a valid proof. Yet in the above example we have a case that the student may never get to 9+5 because all he knows is 9+1. The student does not have the algorithm I proposed. In addition the concept of such an algorithm is so complex it would occur to only some brilliant young student.
Frankly the entire article is just a rehash of what Educational academics spend their time doing. Painful as it may be, memorizing the multiplication tables is essential. Knowing the Lebesque integral of a Markov process may not be but learning how to add, subtract, multiply and divide are critical. Infusing these key constructs with current politico-academic nonsense just detracts from getting 9+12 correct!
Now this has become an international issue. The Socialist UK paper, The Guardian, notes:
In one example, a colored graph features levels of “racial prejudice” by age. Another example, under the heading “adding and subjecting polynomials”, begins with the words: “What? Me? Racist?” and uses the statistical results of a common survey about unconscious bias as an example for a set of mathematics problems....The other examples make references to “social and emotional learning” or “social awareness”, concepts that conservative education activists say are a gateway to leftwing ideology. “Those examples were given with no context and were not even elementary-level material,” Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association that represents more than 150,000 educators, said. “So it seems like it’s more about smoke and mirrors of trying to accomplish a political agenda than really about what we are teaching our kids.” Florida’s banning of the books is widely seen by critics as an extension of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s “culture war” on the supposed indoctrination of children in schools.
Frankly, math books should be just that, math books. Cut out the color pictures, cut out the propaganda and mind bending, focus on the basic principles. Students should have the basic tools of arithmetic, geometry, algebra. Today's world demands a modicum of capability in using a spread sheet, looking after one's IRA and the like. The fundamental problem is eventually the teachers. Teachers in the US must pass a mountain of certifying courses on such things as presentation methods. Namely what type of slides or projectors. If a math PhD from say MIT, back when they did real academics, not now of course where the same nonsense seems to effuse amongst the Commissar controlled faculty, that educated person would be prohibited from teaching in any Primary or Secondary school. But alas as now MIT has a Union perhaps we can get the same level on nonsense.
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