{"id":11333,"date":"2022-08-20T22:08:18","date_gmt":"2022-08-21T02:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=11333"},"modified":"2022-08-20T22:08:18","modified_gmt":"2022-08-21T02:08:18","slug":"social-emotional-mathematics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=11333","title":{"rendered":"Social-emotional mathematics"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been wanting to write about this all the way back in April, when folks became rather upset after Florida rejected<\/a> some school math textbooks. A variety of reasons were cited, including references to critical race theory and things like social-emotional learning.<\/p>\n

Many were aghast: Has the political right gone bonkers, seeing shadows even in math textbooks? And to a significant extent, they were correct: when a textbook is rejected because it uses, as an example, racial statistics in a math problem, or heaven forbid, mentions climate change as established observational fact, you can tell that it’s conservative denialism, not genuine concern about children’s education that is at work.<\/p>\n

But was there more to these rejections than ludicrous conservative ideology? Having in the past read essays arguing that mathematics education is “white supremacist”, I certainly could not exclude the possibility. Still, it seemed unlikely.\u00a0That is, until I came across pages like Mrs. Beattie’s Classroom, explaining “How to spark social-emotional learning in your math classroom<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

Holy freaking macaroni! I thought this nonsense exists only in satire, like a famous past Simpsons episode. But no. These good people think the best way to teach children how to do basic math is through questions like “How did today’s math make you feel?” — “What can you do when you feel stressed out in math class?” — “What self-talk can you use to help you persevere?” or even “How can you be a good group member?” The line between reality and satire does not seem to exist anymore.<\/p>\n

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