Originally Posted by Dude
A hat tip to the Texas Board of Education and its consistent push to whitewash American education is necessary here. When you're presenting bios of mathematicians, you're teaching history, and there are some pretty alarming trends in how history is being taught: http://www.houstonpress.com/news/5-reasons-the-new-texas-social-studies-textbooks-are-nuts-7573825

The OP article is terrible and stupid, but it didn't emerge in a vacuum. It's a reaction to something very real, that has been going on for a very long time, that is terrible and stupid.

The real solution here is to identify that the Texas Board of Education is unqualified to make decisions, override them with national curriculum standards that are more firmly grounded in reality, and bring a more comprehensive approach to math history that acknowledges the outstanding contributions of the many cultures involved.

Funnily enough, we already have national math standards, so it should be pretty easy to pull off in this specific case. All we have to do is follow the process already in place to amend the standards.

Agreed. The article is pretty terrible and stupid; and after reading the professor's book chapter, I'm of many minds about her eduspeak-laced work -- but my main takeaway is that the underlying premise is sound. There *is* a problem, and whether or not this is the way to address it, it needs addressed.

I've volunteered for five years now teaching math to elementary kids, many of whom already suffer, by second or third grade, under the perception that they're no good at math, or that people like them can't be good at math. Some because they're girls, some because they're from families that struggled in math or whose language and cultural background doesn't make typical word problems and other presentations intuitive. And I've seen that these perceptions get reinforced in so many ways by their parents and their teachers, even by me if I'm not careful.

Given that the professor in question is apparently speaking to math as taught in a dedicated math class -- eg. middle school or higher -- I've no doubt that these biases are deep seated in the students before they get to that level, and therefore require dedicated effort to displace.