"These questions include: 'How can you show that you value the ideas of others?' and 'What helps you understand your partner’s ideas?' The book also encourages students to learn how to 'work together' when doing math and to 'listen to our friends and teachers.' Florida Reveal Math Grade 5, which was also rejected, uses similar prompts to encourage students to think critically about how they work with others in the classroom setting. 'When we do math, we listen to the arguments of others and think about what makes sense and what doesn’t,' the book states in the introduction. Other prompts encourage critical thinking and highlight relationship skills, such as: 'What can I learn from others’ thinking about the problem?' and 'What can you do to help all classmates feel comfortable in math class?' The textbook encourages students to think about how they can 'recognize and respond to the emotions of others' and practice building 'relationship[s]' with classmates."
From "Inside the 'dangerous' math textbooks DeSantis claims would 'indoctrinate students'" (Popular Information).
Is dangerousness really the problem? Shouldn't the state reject the math books because they're not sufficiently about math?Math is about getting the right answer, not about feelings or ideologies.
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) April 18, 2022
In Florida, we will be educating our children, not indoctrinating them. pic.twitter.com/BmhBXEljYM
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40 comments:
'What can I learn from others’ thinking about the problem?'
That some are better at math than I, and some are just plain stupid.
When problems get fairly complex, you learn that there are problems that some people can solve but others can't, no matter how hard they try.
'What can you do to help all classmates feel comfortable in math class?'
Stay away from some of them, so you don't rub it in. Explain the bell curve. Have them read Freddie deBoer, to come to terms with the fact that your relative rank in performance doesn't change much over time.
Whatever happened to the concept of academic rigor?
Popular Information? So many ways to spell Commie Scum.
i guarantee you that half of the teachers supposedly teaching this stuff won't know how to do the math themselves. so they will default to emphasizing the warm and fuzzy stuff. Giving kids textbooks that actually emphasize math will be enough for those kids with the ability and desire to learn it themselves. How do I know? That's how I learned it. Any kid with an above average IQ is smarter than half of their teachers.
"Math is a wonderful thing...
So get off your ath and do some math...
Math, Math, Math, Math, Math"
Back in the Sputnik era, some idiots from Washington went to Princeton and asked the professors there what they should do to improve America's math education. Said professors replied, probably without even looking up from what they were doing, that "Math is set theory". So, the Washingtonians went off to beef up American education with set theory. As a result, in 1966, my fifth-grade class studied set theory. I found it kind of silly, but interesting in a way. I rather liked the empty set. And when I came to study advanced math, it turned out the Princeton profs did sort of have a point. But I suspect most of my bewildered classmates would have been better off if they had just made recess half an hour longer.
Shouldn't the state reject the math books because they're not sufficiently about math?
The topics discussed give teachers wide latitude to discuss anything related to why you might not listen to others or strongly consider their ideas.
Once it's in the book, teachers and students are free to return to the topic at any point in the year.
The topic becomes as much "math" as addition or multiplication.
You're talking democrats here... lower your expectations!
'When we do math, we listen to the arguments of others and think about what makes sense and what doesn’t,' the book states in the introduction
EMPLOYEE: Hey my paycheck isn't right.
EMPLOYER: 2 + 2 isn't always 4. You haven't been paying attention to the New Math courses, Just think what makes sense to others.
Looking back, we thought we were getting a boring, 'normal' education in California in the '60s and '70s.
Now I realize that it was world class.
But it's loooong gone...
A few touchy feely extracts from and elementary school math book do not mean the book does not attempt to teach math. (Personally I don't remember that we had MATH books when I was in elemtary school, 60 years ago. Are they now needed if most the teachers don't know math themselves?)
My grand kids seem to be learning arithmetic just fine here in Central PA public school. The elder, in 3rd grade, is starting to get preludes to algebra. I suspect that their math education will be much sounder than the norm in Florida, before or after De Santis burns the books. In PA the ideal is still getting into Penn State or Lehigh and studying engineering. Is the ideal in Florida still to learn enough to bilk a swamp land buyer?
Blogger Jersey Fled said...
i guarantee you that half of the teachers supposedly teaching this stuff won't know how to do the math themselves. so they will default to emphasizing the warm and fuzzy stuff.
My grandson had trouble with "Common Core" math in 4th grade. This was public school. The teacher told my DIL that she could not do the problems either using Common Core. She suggested that his mother teach him math using "traditional methods. They found a charter school.
Oh, vomit.
How I would have hated anything like that in school. Reading "Friends and Neighbors" was bad enough.
EMPLOYEE: Hey my paycheck isn't right.
EMPLOYER: 2 + 2 isn't always 4.
Two plus two = twenty two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh3Yz3PiXZw
Math doesn't care if you're feeling comfortable. As you say, Prof A, this text should be tossed for its inanity.
What a waste of a Yale-Harvard education.
This seems pretty typical for a system that basically warehouses children for a large percentage of each day. Gotta add a lot of off-topic filler in order to have something to do until it's time to go home.
AA might have mentioned, but didn't, Dana Milbank's monumentally unfunny "satirical" account in WaPo of how a FL precalculus textbook is simply shot through with systemic racism. It's not the only such attempt in the last week, but it's certainly the most pitiful.
In PA the ideal is still getting into Penn State or Lehigh and studying engineering. Is the ideal in Florida still to learn enough to bilk a swamp land buyer?
So, understanding feelings about math helps you get into Lehigh? Stanford now has a Physics program for POC. Do you think the math there will get you into Lehigh ?
Counting in a quandary field... feeling.
"The fact is that your relative rank in performance doesn't change much over time." Not true in my case. I had poor vision and hearing and was classified as slow in HS. I accepted this until I took my SAT's. Then I went to a good Engineering school. I ended up as PhD.
"Other prompts encourage critical thinking and highlight relationship skills, such as: 'What can I learn from others’ thinking about the problem?"
"Critical thinking' = Critical Theory.
Math is about getting the correct answer using MATH. Nothing else. You want to live in a 10 story apartment building or drive on a bridge engineered by someone who worked great in a team but sucked at finding the correct answer? Fuck all those morons who stray from getting the correct answer.
Surely you're joking, says Mr. Feynman.
Florida, that great bastion of edumacation and book learnin. Girls gone wild didn't invent itself.
""Critical thinking' = Critical Theory"
Madtownguy, that might be the most wackadoodle thing I have read here in the 12 years I have read things here.
Wow
Kevin said...
Shouldn't the state reject the math books because they're not sufficiently about math?
The topics discussed give teachers wide latitude to discuss anything related to why you might not listen to others or strongly consider their ideas.
Once it's in the book, teachers and students are free to return to the topic at any point in the year.
The topic becomes as much "math" as addition or multiplication.
*************
Baloney. Latitude? Free to return to the topic? At any point in the year? Last time I checked, math classes tackle increasingly difficult topics that depend on students mastering the easier ones.
Getting sidetracked talking about FEEEEELLLZ is death to the concentration and mental discipline mathematics requires.
4/21/22, 5:04 PM
Here in my 98.5% White/Asian town west of Boston, this "feelings" bullshit is everywhere.
From an elementary school webpage describing part of its "Social Emotional Learning" philosophy:
"We also have a school-wide practice of restorative justice-when students are not able to meet expectations with their interactions they complete “Reflection Sheets” where they think about the choices they’ve made, and how they can learn from their mistakes and make better choices in the future."
"restorative justice" is, of course a synonym for "social justice". "Expectations" relates to DEI ideology.
Woe betide any kid who runs afoul of her SJW teacher.
Because, you see, if you don't engage in a ChiCom-style "Self Criticism" session and knuckle under to "DEI" dogma, you will be shunned and isolated, not "welcomed" or "included"----and we can't have that, can we....
Lesson # 1 in math: There is ONLY 1 CORRECT ANSWER (OK, sometimes in algebra there are two correct answers, but work with me here). It doesn't matter how you feel. It doesn't matter if you're a discriminated-againt minority. It doesn't matter if you're male or female, native-born or immigrant, popular or unpopular. Nothing matters except getting the right answer.
Real life isn't that straightforward, but math is a good place to start.
"Math is about getting the right answer, not about feelings or ideologies."
Seriously. Do you want your engineers hired because they emote proper feelings or because they can do the math. Think about it the next time you're crossing one of those long and high bridges.
Luv our Guv.
I kinda think that if you’re good at math in school, and you’ve got a friend who’s good at it too, and if your friend has a different conceptual approach to solving problems, you can probably learn something valuable. But if your friend sucks at math, seeing the approach they take might only teach you what not to do.
Groomer Enabler Howard: "Florida, that great bastion of edumacation and book learnin. Girls gone wild didn't invent itself."
Note to self: Howard has no idea how Spring Break works or where the students come from. Probably because of Putin.
Thank GOD for DeSantis. The left has gone completely off the edge. Time to reign them in, put them in mental institutions, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
"When we do math, we listen to the arguments of others and think about what makes sense and what doesn’t."
I listened to DeSantis's arguments, and they make sense.
"When we do math, we listen to the arguments of others and think about what makes sense and what doesn’t."
COVID masking=climate change crisis=Russian collusion with Trump. They are all matters of faith rather than evidence.
Who remembers study hall? A time and place to do homework but not a time and place to talk and work together.
In our house doing homework was often a social event -- a group of students worked together. Social and productive.
And they figured this out all by themselves.
Whatever happened to the concept of academic rigor?
I think it disappeared from the teachers’ colleges first — maybe in the nineties?
And since, by then, candidates for teaching degrees were already on average, at the bottom of the academic pile, it was probably welcomed gratefully. Now we are in a situation where, since so many teachers are of average ability or worse, they accept the abolition of advanced placement classes without protest because they couldn’t do them themselves.
That is not to say, of course, that there are not still excellent teachers.
Some years ago, our local schools required students to learn in what was explicitly termed "families" of five, which intentionally consisted of above average, below average, and average students who took all their classes, homeroom and lunch together. So the gifted students were expected to essentially educate the slower ones (or just do their work for them, as it turned out) while being denied more challenging curricula. Or to choose their own peers.
This is cultist and powerfully crushes individual initiative. And it occurred in one of the most conservative counties in the country. I don't know if such behavior is still being foisted on young children, but the education schools are still churning out similar garbage by the ton.
And Jim, I taught in the Florida system and know many others who still do. 60% of their students who go on to community college require remedial math classes. If nothing else, that makes for a pretty hefty sludge fund for all the elected officials pushing these schools (and then turning up as paid employees of one stripe or another). The same is true in blue states -- especially California.
We wouldn't have to not purchase these venal books (they are neither burned nor banned) if we has aimed flamethrowers at the schools of education decades ago.
Craig: in 1962, schools of education polled as having the most conservative students on college campuses. By 1972, they were the most leftist.
'How can you show that you value the ideas of others?' I don't, and shouldn't have to
'What helps you understand your partner’s ideas?' My partner being able to express them in clear and correct mathematical form
'listen to our friends and teachers.' The teachers are morons. Neither I nor any of my friends want to discuss feelings in a math class, we just want to get the correct answer
'When we do math, we listen to the arguments of others and think about what makes sense and what doesn’t,' No, that's debate class
'What can I learn from others’ thinking about the problem?' Well, as I'm smarter than all the rest of them, nothing
'What can you do to help all classmates feel comfortable in math class?' Why would I want to do that? Life is graded on a curve
'recognize and respond to the emotions of others' and practice building 'relationship[s]' with classmates. Fuck that noise
"Math is about getting the right answer, not about feelings or ideologies." Correct. Anyone who claims otherwise has no valuable role in society
If I had kids grammar school age, I'd move to Florida
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