As a mother, Jessica Grose wants her fourth grader to be able to do math at grade level, something American schools have proven remarkably poor at achieving.
As a parent, I read this and felt completely exhausted. Partly because I don’t care all that much about whether textbooks explicitly address social and emotional learning. Good teachers, those who care about all of the students in their classes, incorporate these concepts whether they’re spelled out in a textbook. My fourth grader constantly tells me that “practice makes progress,” instead of “practice makes perfect,” because her school is teaching her to keep working at something even if she isn’t great at it right off the bat.
Whether changing a slogan from “practice makes perfect” to “practice makes progress” accomplishes anything in real life is an interesting question to those who ponder slogans. Sure, it eliminates the aspiration of perfection from the equation, because that’s too hard and not everyone can achieve it, and those who fall short will feel badly about themselves and their lives will be ruined and…never mind.
But a mother wanting her child to learn is hardly controversial. So what’s the issue?
Last month, Florida rejected dozens of math textbooks because, the state found, they “included references to critical race theory” or had “inclusions of Common Core” or “the unsolicited addition of social emotional learning.”
Is this really a problem? The starting point for an answer would be to gain a working knowledge of what’s actually at issue here.
The state did not identify which textbooks the examples come from, but one appears to be from an advanced high school algebra or statistics textbook and begins with the phrase, “What? Me? Racist?” It has students work with data reported by an online test that researchers say uncovers hidden attitudes toward different races.
The other appears to come from a teacher’s guide to a kindergarten or first-grade textbook. The lesson is entitled “Social and Emotional Learning – Building Student Agency”; students work together as they put the numbers 1 to 5 in proper order so they can “build proficiency with social awareness as they practice with empathizing with classmates.”
On the one hand, are these “gateway drugs” to “critical race theory,” as that phrase is amorphously used to describe the indoctrination into woke ideology in the classroom?
S.E.L. is the latest front in the educational culture wars, and it’s painted as a kind of gateway drug to critical race theory by its opponents. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, told Goldstein and Saul that while S.E.L. seems uncontroversial, “in practice, S.E.L. serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogies such as critical race theory and gender deconstructionism.”
On the other hand, can’t students just be taught math without making it a culture war problem?
He said that while we still “stink” compared with similarly developed countries, “we have made huge, huge moves forward in improving the math education of our students.” Decades ago, teachers were trying to cram too many topics into every year of instruction, leading to curriculums [sic] that were a “mile wide and an inch deep,” Schmidt told me. In the 1990s, “except for the elite 20 percent, the seventh and eighth grade was still doing arithmetic, when the rest of the world, even the more developing countries, were covering the beginnings of algebra and geometry. We estimated our curriculum was two years behind much of the rest of the world.”
As Grose notes, while we’ve improved math education, we still aren’t doing well enough to compete with the rest of the world. Are we going to close the math and science gap between American students and the rest of the world by “building proficiency with social awareness”? If we can’t manage to teach students that 2+2=4, should the time available in math class be spent on teaching them that 2+2=5? What if we taught math in math class?
While many can (and do) argue that there is nothing wrong with teaching students social awareness or empathy, there is something wrong when it comes at the expense of teaching math. Is it wrong for a parent to want their child to learn math?
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As someone in the mining industry I use math a lot, in both technical and business applications.
I have never had to apply race or social aspects to determine how much ANFO to use or which drill mud is most cost effective in the formation I’m drilling.
In order to be useful, math needs to be taught as a pure tool, not something to reach a social goal.
Given the way math is taught now, it’s no wonder current college grads can’t balance a checkbook with a calculator, let alone do it by hand.
Maybe these books could be used in the class on logic and reasoning to illustrate fallacious arguments from statistics, such as “x% of people who share certain characteristics with you are racist, and therefore, you are racist.” But as to math per se, it should be possible to teach math without also teaching stupidity.
With humble apologies for brazen larceny to Huddie William Ledbetter.
Arithmetic’s learned through devotion
To rules, not appeals to emotion.
Two plus two equals four,
And not less or more,
Good night! These fools have a great notion!
in the real world,
2 + 2 = 5 for very large values of 2 and very small values of 5
Explain this to your therapist. Fubar is not your therapist.
Sorry, gotta balk at this. Sturgeon’s law says you’re probably – almost certainly – right that it’s garbage. But you’re reacting to it as a fad, and decrying it as “interfering with learning math”. I’m fine with the first, but not the second. Neither you nor I can know that until it’s been tested. It’s different, and different is risky and untested, is what you’re not saying.
On the one hand, Social Sciences. Famously squishy. On the other, standardized testing. Which itself is another fad. But possibly a useful one, since it’s intended to measure outcomes, if used properly. (It isn’t, but…) Does “emotional math” (whatever that is) interfere with the math teaching? Are the results uniform over all groups, or is it better for some groups than others? These are things we can find out, if we want to badly enough.
Unless you’re hawking textbooks, of course. Or cultivating voters.
Since when is standardized testing a “fad”? Civil service exams and entrance examinations for universities have been a staple of learning for hundreds of years, thousands even in East Asia. Unless you specifically mean something like the SAT, where schools’ and workplaces’ individual exams have been replaced with a single, all-purpose test good for all university entrance.
Trying to parse the incoherent is rarely a good use of time.
Given the topic of the post, I’m surprised you guys didn’t follow along. I am, after all, chided often enough about being off-topic. I was talking about the standardized testing in grade/high schools – No Child Left Behind. You know, where teachers have incentives to “teach the test”?
If it was used more like the examples you cite (SAT, civil service), it might be a useful tool for studying the effectiveness of teaching methods. As it is, it was itself an experiment that was not followed up on.
If Matt Gaetz and two friends have an ounce of cocaine, and they meet four underage girls and spend an hour snorting coke… how many times can forty go into sixteen.
Show your work.
I just expect that they will be able to make change for a purchase of $6.37, whenI hand them a $10 bill, and $0.12 in coins, without having to use the register as a computer. I see this every month, it seems, and it is all over the racial/gender/ethnic spectrum. But only in people younger than about 30.
“Practice makes perfect” and “Practice makes progress” are both expressions of ideas and both ideas are useful for achieving desired results.
Which is relevant depends on the result of behaviour change desired. For someone wanting to become an elite level practitioner of some task, “practice makes perfect” is a useful belief to have. For someone who wants to perform the same task at adequate but not elite level “practice makes progress” is a more useful idea to possess.