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JERRY P PURSWELL's avatar

In engineering classes, the "show your work" instruction is used as a mechanism to award partial credit when a student uses the correct approach, but makes an arithmetic error in calculating the answer. It is for the benefit of the student.

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The 21st Century Salonnière's avatar

I read the document too, when it first made the Twitter rounds, to make sure it was real and not being exaggerated. Nope.

Now here’s the thing. Anyone who’s not caught in the talons of the woke religion can see that this is a racist approach— to treat kids (who no doubt _are_ affected by racism in _some_ way) as if the existence of racism means they cannot do math; and therefore to hold them to lower standards, thereby _ensuring_ that they don’t learn the same math as other kids (the ones held to higher standards).

The outcome is educational neglect, resulting in kids _for sure_ not knowing the thing you feared they couldn’t learn ...because racism.

This sort of solution (“Hold the kids to a lower standard”) is an easy, lazy “solution” that costs no money and uses no resources.

Just as Obama drinking a tall, cool glass of Flint water was not a substitute for — oh, I don’t know — cleaning the damn water, so is this dumb pedagogical approach not a substitute for — oh, I don’t know— the hard work of addressing whatever conditions might make it so that some unfortunate kids are less prepared to learn math.

When I was a girl in junior high in the late ‘70s, attending a school with a majority of working class and poor black kids, we had social studies textbooks that told us that someday Man might reach the moon. We had pregnant classmates (who back then, had to leave school). We had a math teacher bodily dragged out of the room by a student beating on him. And of course there were daily fights in the halls, in the gym, in the bathrooms, outside the school — you couldn’t avoid fights, even among girls.

So yeah, if my mostly black classmates and I weren’t learning very much, it wasn’t because anyone needed to be held to lower standards. It’s because among many other things, we needed a peaceful learning environment, access to health care, and up-to-date textbooks.

There were plenty of smart, nice kids at the school. There were some kids from troubled families, and many kids from loving families with very limited resources (and other serious challenges), and none of us got a good education there. Not teaching us math would not have helped matters.

So when I think about what would’ve benefitted my classmates and me in the 70s, it was things like: Parents with steady incomes who earn a living wage. Parents with leisure time to take their kids to libraries and museums— who felt things like libraries and museums were places “for them” and not for other people. Food security. Homes with the utilities reliably turned on. Good, committed teachers who weren’t distracted by fear for their personal safety at the workplace. Up-to-date textbooks and other materials. Interesting, enriching extracurricular activities. Safe bathrooms. Really basic stuff — but stuff that costs money.

So we can do the hard work to try to make this country a place where every kid has a good educational opportunity from the very beginning — or we can gnash our teeth and rend our garments about how racist we all are, and do basically nothing to help kids who need to be afforded the same opportunities as middle class kids. We’ll just throw up our hands, say what do you expect, and pursue a strategy that ensures that they _not_ learn. And then pat ourselves on the back for being so (*gag*) “antiracist.”

Laziest way of being “antiracist” I ever heard of.

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