Teacher, scholar, and author Jose Luis Vilson points out some ideas that aren’t being included in the discussion of math education.
Over the last year, New York City has had a fascinating discussion about teaching math. In particular, NYC Department of Education has started to implement a program called NYC Solves, a parallel program to the lauded NYC Reads initiative. NYC Solves hopes to narrow the math achievement gap through a uniform curriculum for the nation’s largest public school system. On the one hand, a common language with a narrow funnel for support and training feels comprehensive given the vast array of challenges facing our schools. On the other, most vocal math teachers decry diminishing professional autonomy, citing scripted lessons and our schools’ checklist culture.
But while we’re so focused on debates about curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, we’re missing on two important discussions. The first is about culture, and specifically the norms we’re living in that inform how we’re thinking about schooling. The second is about notions of “outcomes,” and how we’ve had a hard time decoupling achievement scores with academic learning.
To the first, few people blink when another person says “I’m not a math person.” Typically, the person saying it means that they felt left behind along their educational journey. To an extent, that has merit. Even with the progress made to improve math education, schools still serve as a filter for the maths and math-nots. We still cast too many children as capable or incapable of mathematical learning at multiple levels. I’ve heard countless people tell me either “I wish I had someone like you teach me this math because I would have gotten it” or “it took me until I was an adult to get why math mattered.” Both groups have said “I’m not a math person” when someone else asks. That speaks to culture.
Some might argue that this feels like an individual problem. After all, a significant number of people have come out of our schools fully competent in a wide variety of maths. Our schools have made math more widely available than ever before. Yet, one only needs to look at how we understand “individual” to see the issue. It’s not that personalization doesn’t matter. It’s that our society strives to individualize problems because it relieves people of our collective responsibility to teach children well. The fact that people have meme-ified “I’m a math person” as a get-out-of-math pass is perilous especially because we have no such parallel for reading.