Soucheray: Just because they call it math doesn’t make it so

Joe Soucheray, Pioneer Press
·3 min read

After reading the story twice and even negotiating the predictable woke roadbumps of diversity, equity and inclusion, I, like, well, pretty much everybody, don’t understand the state’s new math standards for K-12 students.

A committee appointed by the Minnesota Department of Education proposed 20 new “anchor standards,” which summarize what students are expected to learn and be able to do in math. Five of those anchor standards apply math concepts to examples “found in historical and contemporary Dakota and Anishinaabe communities and in other communities.”

Why, by which is meant what does this latest jumping the shark have to do with math? Whether math is a concept as opposed to a written-in-stone discipline apparently can be argued in the failed academy, but no matter what your name is or the color of your skin or where you come from, 2+2 still equals 4.

And it has been thus since Archimedes, the Father of Mathematics, was born in Greece almost 300 years before Christ. It might be hard to believe, but math has served humans well for a couple of thousand years without the input of a committee appointed by the Minnesota Department of Education, which quite probably was more interested in signaling its virtue than sticking to the foundational principles that all children must learn.

Here is one of the five proposed anchor standards that reference Minnesota’s American Indian tribes:

“Determine quantities, relationships between quantities, and number systems and their representations found in historical and contemporary Dakota and Anishinaabe communities and in other communities; demonstrate computational thinking and assess the reasonableness of the results.”

Huh?

In each of the five anchor standards that apply to Minnesota’s Native American students, or, more accurately to all students, there are words like reasonableness, generalizations, justifications, visualizations, probabilities, modeling, predictions and relevant problems. Taken together, those words mean there is not a chance in hell a kid could ever flunk a math class.

But it’s not math. Math is either right or wrong. Anything can be generalized, visualized, justified, negotiated and found to be reasonable. But it’s not math.

It is called the failed academy because these progressive re-inventions of traditional disciplines, like math, are setting children up for failure, not success. There is no unique math for children of color. Do you want your child to understand the Pythagorean theorem, or be encouraged to believe that a social or cultural grievance, for example, has a mathematical component because we are calling that math?

Parents of color — all parents — should be outraged that the progressive left is ruining the academy. They are making your children “less than” by believing your child is not capable of success in the traditional arts and letters. Less than. Instead they water down the traditional disciplines or hollow them out all together until they are unrecognizable but amenable to a passing grade so long as grades still actually exist.

The public’s response to these new standards has been almost unanimously negative. That negativity can be turned into a powerful and overdue demand. Parents need to tell the failed academy to stop doing your child a favor. Your child is as capable of success as any child. But to be thought of as less than means they won’t learn very much of anything useful at all.

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