But that isn't the professor's only complaint. She also believes that evaluations for math proficiency perpetuates discrimination against minority students, if they do worse than their white counterparts.
Rochelle Gutierrez argues in a newly published math education book for teachers that they must be aware of the identity politics surrounding the subject of mathematics.
"On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness," she argues with complete sincerity, according to Campus Reform. "Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White."
Gutierrez argues that subjects like algebra and geometry, which relate to arithmetic, also perpetuate racism and white privilege. She worries that "curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans."
Gutierrez claims that the importance of math skills in the real world also places what she calls an "unearned privilege" for those who are good at it. Because most math teachers in the United States are white, white people stand to benefit from their grasp of the subject disproportionate to members of other races.
"Are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?" she asks, raising the question as to why math professors get more grants than "social studies or English" professors.
"If one is not viewed as mathematical, there will always be a sense of inferiority that can be summoned," she says, claiming that minorities "have experienced microaggressions from participating in math classrooms... [where people are] judged by whether they can reason abstractly."
Comment: That's kind of what education is for: learning to reason abstractly.
To resolve the intelligence gap, Gutierrez calls on math professors to develop a sense of "political conocimiento," a Spanish term for "political knowledge for teaching."
She concludes her argument with the claim that all knowledge is "relational," or is, in other words, relative. "Things cannot be known objectively; they must be known subjectively."
Reader Comments
She is NUTS....
How does NUTS get to be a teacher?
Do you want your child taught by a fruit loop nutter?
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2+2= Racist white people !
We've passed the tipping point, you know. There are more people obliviously living in a Disney Land USA than there are people who have some shred of common sense and personal dignity.
This is ridiculous, if not intellectually disastrous. Psychologically, capacity for counting is at the core of a conception of self, the differentiation of consciousness from the primordial all that is. Change the meaning of that meaning and you have something other than human-ness as we know it: a novel constraint placed upon consciousness altered at its roots within conceptualization of itself. Likewise, numbering is both imaginal and subjective/objective; therefore, alteration of a view of the fundamentals of mathematics will alter perception itself, either how a self will apprehend their reality and/or be able to perceive a self within it. Whereas what was just so, i.e. one, not one, and before and after one, was formerly readily apparent across perceptual apparatuses of individuals, now this insane logic - 12 times removed from the imaginal and subjective/objective truths of one and not one, etc. - is attempting to pile abstraction upon - and in the place of - what is just so. Why? Because the responsibility of being one's self has become so convoluted, cloaked as it is in victim-hood, that the existential malaise thereby induces requires it for quick assuage of the pain of a being-ness for which they were ill prepared or trained. This woman, despite the advanced degree, might be a psychospiritual troglodyte. Intellect has out-paced emotional and bodily intelligence. Does the ability to change the color of road-signs matter when you're driving down the road? Really? What of the actual message of those signs, so long as their instrumentality conveys something to you that lets you know of the risks inherent to the roadway?
Is this why the ancients knew better than to let literacy run rampant within a culture? Is this why they cloistered their disciplinarians in esoteric haunts and habits? To those for whom much has been given, much is expected. They knew this, wholesale. And, they knew, too, that for those whom little is given, too much can be disastrously attempted!
Who knew that 2 a + 6 b = 2 (a + 3 b) was racist, Jesus this kind of thing should no longer be tolerated.
Quick everybody to the ‘SAFE ZONE’
Perhaps Jordan Peterson (psychology professor) was right when he said, ‘send your kids to trade school.’
If she said something like ‘where knowledge of psychology would be helpful for teaching…’ that would be something.
But I guess the professor, crunched the numbers, so somebody give the lady free food and a bean bag, were saved…