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| Image from The New York Times |
In her news article “California Tries to Close the Gap in Math, but Sets Off a Backlash” (2021), Jacey Fortin reports that in California, the attempt on revising mathematics instruction in public schools, which has been done by the state, has been strongly criticized as bringing “woke politics into a subject that is supposed to be practical and precise.” According to the news article, since the proposed draft on math education has opened for public comment in February this year, it has created intense debates over “the fundamental question on what or whom is math for?” In addition to that, the controversial issue has been used by Glenn Youngkin, a politician from The Republicans, to win his candidacy for governor in Virginia. Despite the fierce criticism, Dr. Jo Boaler, a professor of education at Stanford University who has been working on the proposed draft, argues that its aims are to provide high school students with alternative math courses such as data science and statistics to calculus, improve equality on accessing high-level math courses to students of different races, deny the belief in gifted children, and use math lessons to connect students to social issues such as immigration or inequality. As mentioned in the news article, in the United States, there is a racial gap in math achievement among the students. The statistics from the civil rights office of the Education Department indicate that 16 percent of students in high schools are Black students and only half of them studied calculus in 2015 to 2016. In contrast, students who are White and Asian dominated in high-level math courses. Although the proposed draft of the new guidelines on math education does not recommend that public schools select students who are good at math for gifted programs to study in advanced math classes in mid schools, the critics argues that it can prevent those students from the benefits of learning advanced materials. According to the news article, the proposed draft is still in the process of revision for further public comment that is expected to be arrange in summer to get approval from the education board of the state.
When Peter, my teacher, assigned this writing assignment to our class, I feft excited about it, as I thought that I am making a progress on learning English and another reason is that The New York Times has been my most favorite newspaper recent years. Before I became a regular reader of the newspaper, I used to read The Economist which I was introduced by my professors at my university about 10 years ago. However, I stopped reading it because it is not relevant to me. In fact, about several years ago, when I studied Eglish at AUA, Peter introduced The New York Times to me in one of his classes, and I have started reading it since then. I think it offers me a variety of topics and news articles that I really enjoy reading, but I have not explored all of its news sections, as I have been addicted to read The Learning Network which is a section that provide great materials on learning English through news articles from The New York Times. In fact, I have found my news article for writing this summary from the section, and it is interesting to me because it made me wonder why people there, in fact almost every where, worried about the particular subject--mathematics.
ReplyDeleteWhy do people really care about how their kids would study math? What would happen to the other subjects such as biology, physic, and so on? In the news article, the people in California have responded strongly to the attemp on revising the math instructions and it has involved politics. I am curious about how the state would respond to it and how the teachers and schools there would react to the change in math education. I think hard about it as I want to become a teacher in next 10 or 15 years, as at that time I am in my 40s or 50s and I will feel bored about working at office. Recently, I have looked for and found many information about a career in education, and I think mathematics is one of my interests. I have found an online course from Harvard Extention School offering a graduate degree on mathematic leadership which aims to train people to become a math teachers in mid school and high school and help their students to overcome challenges when study math. In my experience on studying math in mid school, the subject used to be a thing to indicate intelligence of a student. Fortunately, I used not to be good at math and I would struggle passing it. For me, it would be an alien language which I would not make sense with math concepts. However, now it is just one of my interests, and I am still thinking and finding good reasons on how math important to students like what I can realize how English important to ESL students.