Blog 11

Yes, this one is late. In fact, given the end of the year, they’re all late, but I think that is to be expected. I like to supply good, well-thought blogs when I write them, not a few paragraphs strung together to fulfill an assignment. But enough of me: Onto the blog.

One of the blogs for week 12 was to reflect on what we had learned regarding the inquiry project, and how it has shaped my understanding of public education. Admittedly, I tend to cringe when I read essays that proclaim how much their life is forever changed due to such and such project, and how in succeeding years, he/she will implement these ideas in increasingly dynamic ways. Blah blah blah. The irony, here, is that I genuinely feel this way regarding our project—that of social justice math— and its direct relation to my future career as a teacher of math.

Before I knew anything about social justice math, I wasn’t really sure of its place in the mathematics classroom, a common notion. As I began to dig deeper, I started wondering if I had been exposed to bits and pieces of it while in school and as and editor. Certainly, I had seen items that exposed students to environmental issues, such as tracking the fossil-fuel build-up in the atmosphere. In its own way, this is social justice math, but in terms of inner-city students—in fact all students— it’s also a hair removed. Learning about global warming can empower students to be more eco-friendly, but it is also a hair removed from students’ lives.

After our “walkabout” in Newark, however, I really began to see how social justice math can really be a tool to incorporate into lessons in teaching and a method by which to empower students to learn math and better understand the world around them. Although any cursory trip into the inner city tends to reveal the same types of businesses, I was never aware of the quantity of each type and their proximity to each other. I was also completely unaware of the total paucity of business I would have expected present, but which sadly were not. Based on our trip, I have come to realize that it really is possible to “read the world with mathematics,” as Eric Gutstein suggests, and that this contextual application of mathematics need not be limited to statistics classes, as I had previously feared.

While it is true that out of our walkabout, we came up with a possible set of lessons that teachers could implement, I feel that our project has had a more direct impact for me, as it has opened my mind to bringing more controversial and traditionally social studies type ideas into mathematics class. I find this idea riveting, for a host of reasons. One of these is that while I do enjoy mathematics (and during my free time can be found reading math journals and textbooks) my interests continue outside of math; they include music, history, and the humanities.

Why is this exciting? Well, for one thing it allows mathematics to be more interesting, not only for me, but also for my students. When I think of traditional applications of mathematics, the most common ideas are: 1) Story problems that have no bearing in reality, 2) the mathematics of science, and sometimes 3) the mathematics of music. However, with the inclusion of an idea like social justice math, the applications are more.

For example, for another class I put together a lesson that explored the relationship between race and salary amongst major league baseball players. For me, this lesson was not only interesting to develop, it used mathematics to explore a concept that has long been an element of the history of baseball, while also furthering students’ understanding of difficult statistical concepts like null hypothesis, alternative hypothesis, hypothesis testing, z-scores, and regression equations.

Given these two, very different lesson ideas, I can only imagine the world interesting and socially rewarding mathematics lessons allowed by social justice math, not only for myself, but also for my students.