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Just because your bubble exposes you to the craziest people doesn't mean they represent any majority. It's easy to see those screenshots of people being completely unreasonable, but the truth is most people who are "woke" aren't anything like that.

We see the world through the lens of social media optimised to make us angry at other groups of people.

Most of the people I know are queer and extremely leftist, and they're all massively annoyed at some of the bullshit performative wokeness we see. It's only a very very small minority of people who actually behave like that.

It's like what the linked article mentions with only 4% of people actually caring about the use of latinx. You get angry at people pushing for this and think progressives are stupid, but actual progressives are also annoyed at it because they know it's going to be used as an excuse to make their communities look stupid.

Idk what's a good conclusion on all this but I'd just say, keep in mind that extreme stuff you see online is usually not reflective of any sizeable amount of people

I agree with you, that the majority are not like this. The trouble is the people setting agendas in culture generally, mostly the media, are basically the extreme woke types you say are the minority.

And these people actually have power, as journalists, film directors, etc. they do set the talking points.

So I think it’s completely fair to react to this in a negative way, because it is actually happening.

It would be great if the normal woke minority would reject these people and stand up against them and say they are too extreme, but they don’t.

> For example, it appears to be a woke idea that mathematics, science is some human (more specifically, white) invention and we should explore “alternative mathematics” or “alternative science”.

Do you have a source for this? I’ve never heard of either of these terms, the closest being the “alternative facts” of one of Trump’s press secretaries.

https://equitablemath.org/

This content looks like it is meant to help people learn how to teach math to blacks and latinos effectively, not an alternative math.

… and Multilinguals as well. So Canadians will no doubt benefit from this too?

At some point - once an adult - you have to call bollocks when you see it.

Signed,

A person who can speak five languages.

I just took a skim through the material. The only objectionable thing was couching it in heavily racial or equitable terms, but the bulk of the work is really just trying to look for opportunities to improve pedagogy. The content itself is pretty vanilla and is discussing methods of pedagogy that are pretty old (at first glance it does not seem meaningfully different from the Montessori method and other approaches like “couching math in everyday examples” is an old idea).

The difference is in the results. At the end of the day, children taught by the Montessori method were proficient in reading, writing and math. Today proficiency levels are plunging at the same time that the focus on "education" is being shifted heavily towards "diversity and equity".

https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...

"This tool provides teachers an opportunity to examine their actions, beliefs, and values around teaching mathematics. The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by making visible the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture (Jones and Okun 2001; dismantling Racism 2016) with respect to math. Building on the framework, teachers engage with critical praxis in order to shift their instructional beliefs and practices towards antiracist math education. By centering antiracism, we model how to be antiracist math educators with accountability."

That still has nothing to do with alternative math, but teaching.

It has nothing to do with math, full stop. Yet, math teachers are required to waste their time learning it.

One could consider it a waste of time if it were demonstrated not to be effective improving the outcomes of learing math.

Math teachers need to know (1) math; and (2) how to teach it.

The argumet is that this falls into the second category.

I am not claiming to have read any evidence that it is effective, or even that there is any. I do think this shallow dismissal is improper.

So the burden of proof is on those who doubt that indoctrinating math teachers with critical race theory improves the teaching of math?

That sounds a bit unfair, especially considering that anyone who would seriously try to provide such evidence would probably commit a career suicide, by being called a racist and cancelled.

I've seen a number of attacks on sites like Equitable Math. The criticisms I've seen seem to fall into several categories (this may not be exhaustive):

* "Math should always have one answer and this idea that there could be different ways of doing things is evil and will corrupt our youth. Objective = one answer." Ugh. As a mathematician this is the one I hate the most. This is what led Pythagoreans to campaign against irrational numbers, some Catholics to campaign against imaginary numbers, some folks to react against distributions/generalized derivatives/generalized functions in analysis. The whole point of math, the whole creativity and beauty and opportunity for innovation, is to see how you can break the rules!! Hyperbolic and spherical geometry are not tools of the DeViL!!! Nor are they woke. David Brooks, get a frikkin education [1].

* "You shouldn't talk about race in math because math is objective." Math is a human activity, humans are embedded in society. Brown vs Board was decided within my parents' lifetime. Racial segregation was the official policy of many educational institutions for most of US history and students will come with different educational histories. When you're teaching, you want to connect with students and you want to trace the intellectual history of the topic. It is more intellectually honest to acknowledge the unfairness of history than pretend it doesn't exist, and for students to understand the intertwined evolution of mathematics and technology they must understand historical context as well. When you're trying to motivate kids, especially, role models and stories from history and today can be useful, which is why ET Bell published Men of Mathematics [2] which inspired folks like Freeman Dyson, and we today include Power in Numbers by Talithia Williams, Mathematically Gifted and Black at https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/, Lathisms at https://www.lathisms.org/, Mathematicians of the African Diaspora at https://www.mathad.com/home, and more. There's not much point in dwelling on race/gender/sexuality, but intentional censorship (pretending Alan Turing wasn't gay, pretending Elbert Frank Cox had equal employment opportunities) is deeply dishonest.

* "Math should not be a tool for social justice." Um, what should it be? As I wrote in my other comment on this thread, everything is a tool. Math is a tool for justice, for oppression, for carpentry, for art, for software design, for computer games, for gerrymandering and anti-gerrymandering. As a mathematician I just want everyone to have access to this tool, rather than only some people! The idea that education can help people and society better them/itselves is not new. Check out the work of Bob Moses during the Civil Rights Movement [3]. It's a good read as everyone in America agrees the Civil Rights Movement was Good but many of those people believe "wokeness" is Bad -- because the concept of wokeness is also a tool used for many purposes. The argument is just over how people get to use this tool and who gets to use it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opinion/this-is-how-woken...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Mathematics

[3] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/206027/radical-equa...

Which part of their FAQ intro do you disagree with?

> For decades, America’s schools have tried and failed to close gaps on math test scores between White students and students of color. That’s not because math discriminates by race, and it’s not because some groups of students are inherently more suited to math. It’s because we give students of color and students from lower-income families the least access to critical resources, from the most qualified teachers to the best technology to the most advanced courses. And it’s because instructional materials and practices—even good ones—are influenced by culture and perspective.

> When we think narrowly about teaching math, we create barriers for students; we allow them to fall into the trap of thinking they’re “not a math person.” But the truth is we can all be “math people.” The goal of “A Pathway to Equitable Mathematics Instruction” is to engage as many students as possible in not just solving math problems but understanding math concepts so they can apply them across a wide range of real-world applications. Math problems, of course, have correct answers. But students can arrive at the right answer without understanding the bigger concept or they can have an “aha” moment when they see why they got an answer wrong.

> The toolkit was written by educators, and it doesn’t tell teachers how to do their job—it asks them to think about how they do it. For example, when we ask students to show their work, we should think about how and why. The point should be to have a dialogue about their process and their learning, not require every student to follow the exact same path to the right answer. A child of immigrants might have learned a different way to solve a problem because that’s how their parents were taught where they grew up. If we just tell that student their way is the wrong way, we risk turning them off to math for life. If we take the opportunity to explore why there are different ways to approach the same problem, it can be a learning moment for the entire class

Don't be fooled, this faux-"equitable" stuff is not new. It's been tried for literally decades. And much like other "Woke" ideas like the whole Latinx stuff, it's ridiculously condescending towards the very people it supposedly ought to help.

While not necessarily being “woke”, any research tradition that identifies with post-positivism [1] tends to reject the traditional scientific method and proposes new ways to reach “scientific truth”.

There are many post-positivist research traditions in many fields that you will be able to look up and read more about if you are interested in specific citations and authors that do this kind of work.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpositivism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpositivism

Seattle, 2019: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/06/ethn-d06.html

> School district leaders in Seattle, Washington recently released a proposal to incorporate ethnic studies in the mathematics curriculum at all levels from kindergarten through grade 12. This initiative is part of an ongoing redesign of the district’s entire core subject curricula based on identity politics. The plan will be reviewed and voted on by the school board before the next academic year.

> Published by an Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee (ESAC), the new math curriculum is based on four major themes. These do not include, as one might think, numerical literacy, logic and problem-solving, or reasoning by analogy. Instead, the framework for K-12 will be Origins, Identity, and Agency, identified as “the ways in which we view ourselves as mathematicians”; Power and Oppression, based on the “disenfranchisement” of “people and communities of color”; History of Resistance and Liberation, the “stories, places and people who helped liberate people and communities of color using math, engineering and technology”; and Reflection and Action, urging young people to identify “mathematicians of color” and empower “their identities as mathematicians.”

Note the complete lack of 'math proficiency' theme. Fortunately it appears the proposal has not made it into the actual curriculum. https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/mathematics.

A fine way to keep the poor poor is teaching them to identify as victims and not learn math. There are always bad ideas that need to be exposed for what they are.

While I agree with your narrative, it also seems like a perfect straw man. It seems like the world has gone crazy, but via the web we're exposed to every crazy thing.

I don't know how to reconcile these two things. There are surely people stuck in environments for whom it completely describes their experience. But like the wokeness narratives themselves, there are also going to be people facing adversity for other reasons who end up misattributing their difficulties to "wokeness".

Perhaps it's just the same social bullying behavior there has always been, but couched in new criteria. Perhaps these new terms are just foreign to us (eg we're used to school bullying in terms of who plays football), and the overall situation is actually getting better. Or perhaps not.

I think in order to discuss it with the weight of a societal problem, there at least needs to be some measurable framework and resulting data showing effects and trends. To do otherwise is just stoking the identity politics dumpster fire.

Not denying the use of a straw man or some humor to illustrate my point.

Like any movement, I’m sure there are some valid points being made. And like any movement, this one appeals to some legit human needs: significance, connection, contribution, etc.

I think my main beef with wokeism is how disempowering it ends up being to an individual subscriber. The ideas being perpetuated (I am a victim, I am an oppressor but will now be a white savior) are useless and counterproductive in the real world.

The very sad and unfortunate thing is that some naive people are tying up their whole identities with this crap just to feel validated or connected to some group. No judgement, we all need those things. My concern is that they will end up figuring out way too late that internet points don’t pay the rent.

The underlying question is how big this "movement" is, or whether it's been blown out of proportion by the opposing political team, who benefits from the bogeyman.

So yes, your criticism of wokeism is valid. The question is how relevant it is. You mention "some naive people". Yes, in a highly connected world of 8 billion people, some people are doing literally anything. The question is whether there is enough of a new trend to make for an actual concern, or whether it's being blown out of proportion and context. This matters because opposition to wokeness seems to be its own strain of identity politics.