Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice

This introductory course explores principles of social justice in education as a lens in rethinking school mathematics. The course will provide participants with a) an opportunity to expand their knowledge and awareness of issues of social justice in the context of mathematics education; b) an opportunity to develop a pedagogical model for teaching for social change; c) a process to critically examine the content of school mathematics curriculum and instructional practices from the perspective of social justice; d) an opportunity to contemplate on the role of the teacher as an agent of change and “transformative intellectual”. Throughout the course we will emphasize the relationship between theory and practice in an attempt to understand some of the complexities and challenges in addressing issues of social justice in mathematics teaching and learning.

' The Young Conservatives [at Texas A&M] ranked Bonilla-Silva as the top perpetrator of academic abuse in the classroom in their Professor Watch List Hall of Dishonor.

[A spokesperson] said the ranking was partially based on written comments. In Bonilla-Silva’s syllabus for his “Sociology of Minorities” class, he called the U.S. “The United States of Amerikkka” and said he would “remove the three K’s from this word when the USA removes racial oppression from this country!”

The Young Conservatives’ list claimed “Bonilla-Silva also routinely refers to conservative students as ‘Nazis’ or ‘klan-like’” and does not allow them to dissent in class.

Though not completely surprised by the attacks, Bonilla-Silva … said students gave him positive teacher evaluations, a fact he considered impressive for a professor with liberal views on a generally conservative campus.

Bonilla-Silva said the statements the group criticized were “tongue-in-cheek.” '

UVA PROFESSOR FALLS DOWN SHAFT


Crews with the Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad, and City Fire Department responded to a tactical rescue at Campbell Hall on the grounds of the University of Virginia. When they arrived they found a man inside a shaft.

It happened just before 3 o'clock in the afternoon inside Campbell Hall at the University of Virginia. Inside the hall, which serves as part of UVA's architectural school, was a professor and group of people involved in a tour of the facility.

At some point during the tour, the man went into a 200 foot tunnel, believed to be a utilities maintenance area, when he fell.

Responders from the Charlottesville Fire Department, and Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad used six pieces of equipment to rescue the professor whose injuries are consistent with a fall such as this.

The professor was taken to the hospital at the University of Virginia.

The problem for Democrats is that an important part of their base -- upscale white liberals -- seems torn about the meaning of patriotism… The right answer to GOP jingoism, …cannot be left-wing anti-Americanism. Of course, progressives can criticize their country and still be patriotic. Indeed, one of the highest forms of patriotism is being honest about your country's flaws and taking responsibility for fixing them. But it is what's in your heart that counts. Are your objections rooted in a warm and generous affection for your country, or in a curdled contempt for it? Too many Americans aren't sure if the left is emotionally on America's side. And that's a big problem for Democrats.

The left's unease with patriotism is rooted in a 1960s narrative of American arrogance and abuse of power. For many liberals who came of age during the protests against the Vietnam War, writes leftish commentator Todd Gitlin, "the most powerful public emotion of our lives was rejecting patriotism." As he and other honest liberals have acknowledged, the excesses of protest politics still haunt liberalism today and complicate Democratic efforts to develop a coherent stance toward American power and the use of force.

…[Americans’] …frame of reference is not the Vietnam War, but Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks evoked the most powerful upsurge in patriotic feeling since Pearl Harbor, and thrust national security back into the center of American politics. Democrats have yet to come to grips with this new reality. More than anything else, they need to show the country a party unified behind a new patriotism -- a progressive patriotism determined to succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror, to close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and to summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice to counter the politics of polarization. …

Patriotism is the ultimate values issue. Democrats need not be embarrassed by it. And they ought not to let Republicans monopolize the emblems of national pride and honor. Democrats need to be choosier about the political company they keep, distancing themselves from the pacifist and anti-American fringe. And they need to have faith in their fellow citizens: Americans will accept constructive criticism of their country if they know the critic's heart is in the right place.

The range of American political discourse is pathetically limited to often-superficial differences and trivial debates between two equally corrupt parties that are captive to corporate America and the military-industrial complex. …Why are conservatives so terrified at the notion of socialist views being expressed in these realms that they have poured hundreds of millions of dollars in the past thirty years into overwhelming them? Why do they hysterically depict corporate-servant Democrats like Clinton and Kerry as radical socialists? And why do they smear democratic socialists by distorting their beliefs and equating them with their deadly enemy, Communism — when such red-baiting would be recognized as nonsensical anywhere else in the world?

[T]he aesthetic response should be [our] initial response [to a novel]. Otherwise why bother with the "art" at all? Why fool around with the formal manipulations and the fancy writing in the first place when we can just leap headlong into the "content"? If the aesthetic is a "peculiar mode of appreciation," why not demand that the artist stop tempting us with it? By all means discuss the content. Just don't do so as if the artist had made it available to us in the same way as the essayist or the polemicist.

The aesthetic: A peculiar mode of appreciation that wishes to place in brackets or disavow the obvious content of a work and stress instead form and symbolism.

The bourgeoisie has an...interest in preserving a certain myth of the aesthetic consciousness, one where a transcendental ego is given something appropriate to contemplate in a situation essentially detached from the pressures and deformities of history. The interest is considerable because the class in question has few other areas (since the decline of the sacred) in which its account of consciousness and freedom can be at all compellingly phrased.

Why should we have aesthetics OR the moral? (The moral, of course, meant in its largest sense, to mean something like 'meaningful human conduct and the discourse about that'.) Why not both? The aesthetic is a human product, and so it will always have a moral dimension.

…Chekhov is a great writer because he is a great stylist, and because of certain qualities of his style he is also a great humanist. Flaubert gives rise to moral doubts, at times, on the part of readers, because his style seems to incarnate a kind of hatred of his subjects; he longed, famously, to write a book about 'nothing, with no external attachment', and there are times when his aestheticism seems to want to do away with matter altogether, to pulverize the human subject.

To call something, in a derogatory way, 'mere aestheticism' is to make a moral judgment about certain kinds of aesthetic decisions. (This isn't being only a moral critic; it is being a moral and an aesthetic critic: what other kind could there be?) Chekhov, for me, is so miraculous because an absolute perfection of form -- he instructed the journal editor of 'The Bishop' not to change a single word -- co-exists with the opposite of Flaubert's misanthropy. Style, for Chekhov, seems not to have been in any necessary conflict with the humane. He is the great stylist and the great humanist.

Henry James … exactly showed, in his critical comments on Flaubert and others, that a great interest in the moral and a great interest in the formal can and should co-exist. Truth and beauty together, not separated. I thought all this was pretty obvious.

…Surely when ideas take fictive form, as they do as soon as a narrative of any seriousness is essayed, they become indistinguishable from aesthetics? This is what an idea or an argument IS in fiction: it has taken a form which it could not exactly have taken outside this particular fiction; it has an aesthetic shape; it has been irrevocably modified by aesthetics.

It was Eliot … who best said this in his famous words about how Henry James's mind was so fine that no idea could violate it. He didn't mean that James wasn't thinking; he meant that James thought fictively.

"Molly Ivins, a Texan who's described herself as 'a left-wing, aging Bohemian journalist,' delivers her hard-Left views in prose distinguished by mean-spirited potshots marinated in a somewhat labored cornpone populism."

[It] seems to mark an incompatibility between a musical idea and its realization. In the Tempest, the differences between exposition and recapitulation alert us to the conflict. In the deformed seventh-chords of the recapitulation, we can actually hear the musical idea (an abstract, mental thing) being compromised by the exigencies of actual physical performance. In the Fifth, there is a similar incompatibility between what is conceived (two very different chords, with different functional meanings) and what is played (a single sound).

[We] can have tremendous, Beethovenian passions without losing all sense of our own limitation. (As one can have powerful political convictions while still recognizing that reasonable people may disagree.) Beethoven himself may not have achieved the perfect synthesis of these two, complementary qualities. But the evidence of both his music and his life suggests that he tried. Passionate maturity, neither resignation nor moderation nor fanaticism: that, perhaps, is what is truly sublime.

The argument that competition increases polarization assumes that liberals want to read liberal newspapers and conservatives conservative ones. Natural as that assumption is, it conflicts with one of the points on which left and right agree - that people consume news and opinion in order to become well informed about public issues. Were this true, liberals would read conservative newspapers, and conservatives liberal newspapers, just as scientists test their hypotheses by confronting them with data that may refute them.

But that is not how ordinary people (or, for that matter, scientists) approach political and social issues. The issues are too numerous, uncertain and complex, and the benefit to an individual of becoming well informed about them too slight, to invite sustained, disinterested attention. Moreover, people don't like being in a state of doubt, so they look for information that will support rather than undermine their existing beliefs. They're also uncomfortable seeing their beliefs challenged on issues that are bound up with their economic welfare, physical safety or religious and moral views.

[However], for that sliver of a sliver that invites challenges to its biases by reading The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, that watches CNN and Fox, that reads Brent Bozell and Eric Alterman and everything in between, the increased polarization of the media provides a richer fare than ever before.

A University of Georgia instructor says linebacker Tavares Kearney twisted her wrist after she confiscated his camera cell phone because she suspected him of using the device to cheat on a nutrition exam.

A battery charge instructor Dawn Penn filed against Kearney was dropped Wednesday, but the freshman player could still face school discipline for the incident, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Friday.

Penn said she took the phone from Kearney after he apparently took a photo image of an answer key to a version of a test he was taking July 15, according to a police incident report. The answer key had been accidentally distributed to the class earlier and the instructor had asked for them to be passed back to her.

After the teacher took the phone, Kearney asked for it back. When Penn refused, the 6-foot-1, 210-pound Kearney allegedly grabbed the woman's left hand, which was holding the phone, squeezed it and twisted her wrist.

Penn, a 27-year-old graduate student overseeing the exam, said she did not want to pursue criminal charges against Kearney, but she is pursuing an academic honesty investigation of the player.

Kearney has since withdrawn from the course and has returned to his home in Atlanta, a school spokesman said.

His football eligibility is uncertain pending the outcome of the university inquiry.
"It's my intent to withhold comment until that process has been exercised," coach Mark Richt said.

If Kearney is unable to compete for Georgia this fall, he'll become the seventh member of the 19-player incoming class to miss the season. Five others did not meet academic requirements and a sixth, Antavious Coates, suffered a season-ending knee injury this summer.

Three returning players have been suspended for the season opener against Boise State following offseason arrests. A fourth, Derrick White, was kicked off the team after being arrested on a DUI charge. And junior fullback Des Williams is out for the season after tearing a chest muscle.

Jeez, you’d think their first freedom-enshrining Constitution would be getting more press (did they have this problem in 1776?) Why is it we have to go to a non-media source for news that should be trumpeted across the front pages of every freedom-loving newspaper in the world? …Ho-hum, democracy and freedom being codified for 25 million people. Yawn.

Roman Polanski, the film director, was today awarded £50,000 libel damages over a Vanity Fair article which stated that he made sexual advances to a Scandinavian woman soon after his wife’s brutal murder in 1969.

The jury of nine men and three women took four-and-a-half hours to reach their unanimous verdict at London’s High Court. Publisher Conde Naste also faces a legal bill estimated at £1.5 million.

His lawyer, John Kelsey-Fry, argued that Mr Polanski had been "monstrously libelled for the sake of a lurid anecdote" in the 2002 article which accused him of propositioning the woman in a New York restaurant while on the way to Sharon Tate's funeral.

It alleged that Polanski, director of Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist, put his hand on the woman’s thigh and promised her: "I will make another Sharon Tate out of you."

During the high profile trial, Conde Nast accepted that the incident did not happen before Miss Tate’s funeral, but about two weeks later. It maintained the article was substantially true and argued that Mr Polanski's reputation had already been ruined by his 1978 conviction and promiscuous past.

The publisher's case was dealt a devastating blow when it emerged that Beatte Telle, the Norwegian woman allegedly at the receiving end of his unwanted attentions, had not been called to give evidence.

In a statement, Mr Polanski said: "It goes without saying that, whilst the whole episode is a sad one, I am obviously pleased with the jury’s verdict today. …Three years of my life have been interrupted. Three years within which I have had no choice but to relive the horrible events of August 1969, the murders of my wife, my unborn child and my friends… Many untruths have been published about me, most of which I have ignored, but the allegations printed in the July 2002 edition of Vanity Fair could not go unchallenged."

Outside court, Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, said: “I find it amazing that a man who lives in France can sue a magazine that is published in America in a British courtroom. Nevertheless it was interesting to see the wheels of British justice move, and I wish Mr Polanski well. We have a magazine to put out..."

JOHN ROBERTS, THE ANTI-BUSH? I don't know heads or tails about constitutional law, so I'll have to focus on the politics of John Roberts' nomination. And what I know so far is that 'liberal' journalists are falling all over themselves to see who can praise Roberts more.

Why? Because Roberts is the opposite of everything they hate about Bush. Consider this mash note from the NYT:

[Roberts] was always conservative, but not doctrinaire. He was raised and remains a practicing Roman Catholic who declines, friends say, to wear his faith on his sleeve...

John G. Roberts is an erudite, Harvard-trained, Republican corporate-lawyer-turned-judge, with a punctilious, pragmatic view of the law.

Mind you, that's a straight news article I'm quoting, not an editorial or even a "news analysis" column. Liberal activists must be fuming -- positive coverage from the NYT, WaPo, etc. is turning Roberts' confirmation into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Technically, the editorial boards at the Times and the Post are insisting that we must all reserve judgment until the Senate has conducted a thorough and substantive examination of Roberts' merit as a judge. But who're they kidding?

When the WaPo is running headlines such as "Democrats Say Nominee Will Be Hard to Defeat" , there is simply no way to portray Roberts as the sort of "extreme ideologue with an agenda of stripping away important rights" that the NYT says is unacceptable on the nation's highest court.

Now why has the media decided to give John Roberts the kid glove treatment? It's not because he went to Harvard College and Harvard Law. After all, Bush has degrees from Harvard and Yale. What matters a lot more is that Roberts graduated summa cum laude and was the managing editor of law review. He's not just an Ivy Leaguer -- he's the kind of Ivy Leaguer that journalists and pundits wish their children could be.

In other words, Roberts is supposedly the kind of Ivy Leaguer who thinks in a way that fellow Ivy Leaguers readily understand and heartily praise -- whereas Bush doesn't.

Consider how the NYT's Elisabeth Bumiller describes Bush's decision to nominate Roberts rather than Harvie Wilkinson:

"Well, I told him I ran three and a half miles a day," Judge Wilkinson recalled in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "And I said my doctor recommends a lot of cross-training, but I said I didn't want to do the elliptical and the bike and the treadmill." The president, Judge Wilkinson said, "took umbrage at that," and told his potential nominee that he should do the cross-training his doctor suggested.

"He thought I was well on my way to busting my knees," said Judge Wilkinson, 60. "He warned me of impending doom."

Judge Wilkinson's conversation with the president about exercise and other personal matters in an interview for a job on the highest court in the land was typical of how Mr. Bush went about picking his eventual nominee, Judge John G. Roberts, White House officials and Republicans said. Mr. Bush, they said, looked extensively into the backgrounds of the five finalists he interviewed, but in the end relied as much on chemistry and intuition as on policy and legal intellect.

I would say that the often-condescending Ms. Bumiller has thoroughly misunderestimated the president. While I'm sure that Bush asked Wilkinson about his exercise habits, we have every reason to believe that Bush carefully chose himself a candidate with both strong conservative beliefs and an incomparable ability to persuade Democratic senators to support his nomination.

In fact, it is precisely because Bumiller and others perpetuate such hackneyed stereotypes about Bush's intellect that John "summa cum laude and law review" Roberts has established himself so rapidly as an unborkable candidate.

' Speaking at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford University, futurist George Gilder predicted a harrowing future for humanity. TV will die, he said, and be replaced by blogs.

"TV is dying fast. ...There are only a few channels available. TV was [a] technology of tyrants. It fed this advertising model that has collapsed," Gilder told an audience at the conference. "The thirty-second spot is just going to die. Nobody is going to watch any ads they don't want to see.” '

As a University of Oregon alumnus, I read with some disquiet about the University’s Five Year Diversity Plan.

The most disturbing aspect of this plan is the purposefully undefined notion of “cultural competency.” John Shuford asserts that this vague concept was left so because it “would not be appropriate for the drafters of the blueprint to impose a definition because that might have led to adverse responses by some” (ODE, June 30, “Diversity plan sparks controversy with faculty”).

What? In other words, they didn’t define the governing idea of their plan because someone might not like their definition? This, at a large university, is the actual response of a salaried member of the administration? They didn't do something that needed to be done because somebody might not like them for doing it? Good God.

The authors of the diversity plan are going to govern a large part of University life based on an undefined concept, which they will get around to defining — if ever they do — at some equally undefined time down the road, if and when everyone promises not to get mad at them? No wonder the faculty is rebelling.

...If the people behind this plan — which for all I know may be a fine plan if done properly — cannot find sufficient steel in their spines to go out on a limb and define “cultural competency,” they have no business writing the plan in the first place.

Less and less, in society as well as in the University, are there people willing to take principled but intelligent stands on issues of importance. To do so requires careful thought, a mind willing to keep alive a little doubt in every certainty and, above all, the willingness to be wrong. If you don’t define “cultural competency,” you don’t ever have to risk being wrong about it. But if you are not willing to take such a risk, you need either to excise the concept from the plan, or turn it over to someone who is willing to take the risk.

Curt Hopkins
1991 Honors College graduate

"Among other charges in [her] suit [against Southeastern Louisiana University], [former Dean] Landesberg-Boyle said her Jewish identity was often met with scorn at Southeastern. She said that when a Jewish candidate was interviewed for an SLU position in 1998, one campus employee told an administrator in a memo that 'we don't need another neurotic coffee-drinking Jew.'"

That there are so many more Arabs (and Turks) than Kurds has determined attitudes toward the Kurdish people. The issue is, obviously, not only numbers. It is also a matter of the power of Arab — and Muslim — states. It entails concern for oil and Turkey’s strategic location. And finally, it concerns the fact that the Kurds are not only a small people, they also do not have powerful friends. They are a nation without many cousins abroad or fraternal allies.

One can understand why governments and chancellors respond to these dilemmas with realpolitik, but it is a scandal that liberal, left-wing opinion, supposedly motivated by humanistic and universal values, has traditionally ignored the case of the Kurds. How often have left-wing intellectuals and protesters who condemn Israeli policies — sometimes rightly, sometimes less so — mobilized on behalf of the Kurds and against their oppressors — Saddam’s Iraq, but also Turkey?

This is a stain on the record of the European and American left. The only consolation may be that the present geopolitical situation, brought about by the toppling of Saddam, may perhaps give the Kurds in Iraq, for the first time in history, a place in the sun, either in a federal, democratic Iraq or, ultimately, in a state of their own.

Should this happen, Kurdish self-determination would not be due to the support of the left, but to the questionable politics of the Bush administration. Perhaps some people on the left ought to examine their consciences. Those of us who share a belief in Hegel’s “cunning of reason” — that is, the idea that great historical consequences don’t always come from the intentions of historical actors — may, once again, and against our moral preference, be vindicated.

This is the flag of Kurdistan in my lapel; but my Kurdish comrades say that …their main responsibility is for the new Iraq now. And they who would have every right to say we want to get out of this prison house of the state are willing to still cooperate to help to emancipate the rest of it. I think that's an extraordinary sacrifice on their part. Deserves more recognition than it's had.

A voice,
crying in the wilderness,
and then just crying

By Tom Smith

Do you sometimes feel, Professor, that no one is listening to you, that your articles are ignored? IS ANYBODY LISTENING?!! Well, the bad news is, you are probably right. That is, you probably are being ignored. I will try to make this point in forthcoming article(s), but probably no one will pay any attention to me, so this is your chance . . .

I just got some new data back from Lexis, with whom I am engaged in a massive citation study, but that's another story. This data concerns law review articles that are in their Shepard's database and how much they get cited. This data covers about 385,000 law review articles, notes, comments, etc. etc. that appear in 726 law reviews and journals, and looks at how often they are cited. Cited by other law reviews, or cases.

First of all, 43 percent of the articles are not cited . . . at all. Zero, nada, zilch. Almost 80 percent (i.e. 79 percent) of law review articles get ten or fewer citations. So where are all the citations going? Well, let's look at articles that get more than 100 citations. These are the elite. They make up less than 1 percent of all articles, .898 percent to be precise. They get, is anybody listening out there? 96 percent of all citations to law review articles. That's all. Only 96 percent. Talk about concentration of wealth.

Why, you ask, is it like this? You should read my paper here, into which this new lawrev data will be incorporated, though I think it may justify a little article on its own. Similar dynamics are probably at work. Possible titles: Why this article (and yours) is a waste of time. Or, Stop that law professor before he writes again. This distributions of cites to law review articles and to cases look the same. Your basic stretched exponential with a long tail, or some would say a power law distribution. On a log-log chart, close to a 45 degree line.

So stop that blogging, professors, and get back to writing those law review articles!

Hypocognition results when a term is used to conjure up all-positive images to prevent us from understanding what is really going on. For example, hypocognition makes it hard for the public to believe there can be anything wrong with “globalism” or “free trade,” which sound like the apple pie and motherhood of the 21st century.

have been wrong to assume that people are rational actors who make their decisions based on facts; in reality, he says, cognitive science has proved that all of us are programmed to respond to the frames that have been embedded deep in our unconscious minds, and if the facts don't fit the frame, our brains simply reject them. Lakoff explained to me that the frames in our brains can be "activated" by the right combination of words and imagery, and only then, once the brain has been unlocked, can we process the facts being thrown at us.

"Much more than an offering of serious political strategy, [Lakoff’s book,] Don't Think of an Elephant! is a feel-good, self-help book for a stratum of despairing liberals who just can't believe how their common-sense message has been misunderstood by eternally deceived masses," Cooper wrote. In Lakoff's view, he continued, American voters are "redneck, chain-smoking, baby-slapping Christers desperately in need of some gender-free nurturing and political counseling by organic-gardening enthusiasts from Berkeley."

Public Relations Campaign
for Research Office at E.P.A.
Includes Ghostwriting Articles

The Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking outside public relations consultants, to be paid up to $5 million over five years, to polish its Web site, organize focus groups on how to buff the office's image and ghostwrite articles "for publication in scholarly journals and magazines."

The strategy, laid out in a May 26 exploratory proposal notice and further defined in two recently awarded public relations contracts totaling $150,000, includes writing and placing "good stories" about the E.P.A.'s research office in consumer and trade publications.

The contracts were awarded just months after the Bush administration came under scrutiny for its public relations policies. In some cases payments were made to columnists, including Armstrong Williams, who promoted the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind and received an undisclosed $240,000. In January, President Bush publicly abandoned this practice.

...

Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science magazine and a former head of the Food and Drug Administration, said in a telephone interview on Saturday that he found the idea of public relations firms ghostwriting for government scientists "appalling."

"If we knew that it had been written by someone who was not a scientist and submitted as though it were the work of a scientist, we wouldn't take it," Mr. Kennedy said. "But it's conceivable that we wouldn't know, if it was carefully constructed."

He added that the practice of putting public relations polish on scientific work has already been practiced by industry. "We had seen it coming in the pharmaceutical industry and were sort of wary about it," he said. "The idea that a government agency would feel the necessity to do this is doubly troubling."

"Why the hell didn't anyone mention that I could have hired PR people to pimp up my material before I handed in my friggin' tenure file???!!!"