Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash I’ve been working on this post for the better part of a week, trying to decide if it was worth posting. Then yesterday a New York Times headline came across my phone and it nudged me to hit “Publish.”
“India’s Lost Generation: Lengthy pandemic shutdowns have led to young people leaving school altogether, dimming the prospects for the country’s economic future”
As some epidemiologists, who I’ll come back to later, warned us about in fall of 2020, lockdown policies have have had a devastating impact on young people and it’s time to take that policy decision, school closures due to Covid, off the table.
Image credit: https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-06-22 A few years ago I read Jo Boaler’s book, “Mathematical Mindsets” and I thought it contained some good ideas. There were a few things that I thought were not realistic or would be difficult to scale, but overall I found the book useful. Our department read it together, and I remember a colleague pointing out that Boaler often cited her own research. That revelation made me more skeptical of her work, especially when she provided citations.
A few years ago, I noticed that the words diversity, equity, and inclusion were steadily gaining in popularity, especially in K-12 education. At first, I couldn’t see a problem with the concepts. But as I dug deeper I discovered that much of the movement behind these words, although advanced by people with the best of intentions, was contradictory, illogical, and somewhat unethical. Take the defining of every action as either “racist” or “anti-racist, for example.
In our textbook slope fields come during the differential equations unit, which for the last 8 years made sense to me. But every year there were groans from students and comments about how “pointless” they are.
Well, here’s why students think they’re pointless.
They already know antiderivatives. So they can take many differential equations and find the family of functions whose derivative is given. Many of the basic slope field problems can be somewhat easily antiderived, especially once students know about separation of variables.
I have a couple concerns regarding “Social Justice Math” that I don’t think I’ve seen addressed. (If they have been, please let me know.)
From what I’ve read SJM is billed as a way to bring real world problems into the classroom with a “justice” lens. Problems related to climate change, economic inequality, racial equity, etc., would be used in class as frameworks for learning different math concepts. (Read more on that here.