Battleground Schools

The first stop arrived immediately when I saw the table comparing conservative and progressive math education. I am surprised myself to see quite a few conservative stances on math, despite being quite a progressive person myself. For example, I saw mat as platonic forms, rather than patterns, and I saw math as authoritative rather than exploratory, probably because that’s the environment I learned math in growing up. But I really like the mindset of teaching math as stimulation of inherent human problem-solving, and that math is knowledge distributed to all problem solvers. I never really knew how to put my own philosophy on math into words, but this table illustrates it quite well for me. It is also very interesting to learn more about the conservative math education approach, so I can emphasize with the math teachers I grew up with. It’s a very interesting visual to look at!

And leading into my second stop, it’s interesting to see that school administrators have non-math teachers teach math since this subject has teacher-proof subjects. Just something about this clicked… math teachers aren’t bad at their job, most math teachers just aren’t math teachers! I started to think back to the math teachers I’ve had, and I’m really starting to wonder if they are actual mathematicians, or teachers of other subjects who ended up here. Either way, the shortage of people who wants to teach math lead society to this point, many teachers who are mathphobic themselves, teaching their students and probably influencing them consciously or unconsciously. I hate the idea of math being for the elites and most educated, since that is what causes a big portion of the mathphobic, but reading about it makes so much more sense. I am just surprised that I’ve never thought about it that way. I am starting to see what drives teacher and even parents to be conservative math educators, it’s not their fault, they had to teach an entirely different subject with no background knowledge at all!

The title of “Math Wars” is kinda funny to be honest, I didn’t expect to read those two words together in professional school hahaha. But, the entire section on the battle of math curriculum is disheartening because of how much politics there are in math! I always knew education can get very political, but to me, math has always been immune since it’s just understanding numbers. But, it’s very interesting to see different legislator changing different curriculums through conservative, liberal, Christian, and many views. The worst part is the media, who wants to capitalize on this and create stronger divides to get more engagement. As much as I want to avoid politics, I know it’s inevitable in the classroom. So it’s very worthwhile to be aware of those conflicts.