Thursday, February 25, 2021

Do You Like Bridges That Don't Fall Down? Cars That Don't Explode?

If you like all those aspects of modern life we've become used to; bridges that don't fall down, cars that just run, aircraft that don't fall out of the sky, things like that, you might want to get involved with your local school board.  The "math is racist" nonsense is really getting out of hand.  

Stephen Green at PJ Media has gotten a little deeper into the subject in his regular "Insanity Wrap" column on PJ Media web site.  It has gotten worse since I last looked at what the advocates were saying back early in the Obama years, about 2011.  I downloaded a file from Radical Math and their emphasis was that thinking about math was too foreign to some people and the teachers needed to make it relevant to their lives.  Now it's gone hard left and the arguments are that math is part of systemic racism and white supremacy.  


The 82 page pdf document contains month-by-month programs for the math teachers, September to June.  This is the summary of the teaching goals for April.  I want  you to really look at the bottom paragraph on the left and this sentence in particular:  “Schooling as we know it began during the industrial revolution, when precision and accuracy were highly valued.”  There's no need for precision and accuracy today?  To hand the floor to Green.
Today we build little four-banger car engines that produce more than 300 horsepower, reusable rockets, entire constellations of communications satellites operating in every imaginable orbit, and stealth jet fighters that lose their near-invisibility if a single element is slightly out of whack.

But no, this modern age of ours no longer values precision or accuracy.

Well, we’d better, if we want to prevent the whole damn system from falling down around us.
We could do days on the need for precision and accuracy.  How about landing Perseverance on Mars after seven months and hundreds of millions of miles of travel?  How about creating rocket engines and getting the analyzed performance out of them?  Digging underground tunnels and having them meet up properly?  The world offers tons of examples.  Do these "teachers" think that precision and accuracy only come from the computers? 

This "2 + 2 = 4 is racist" nonsense is a dire threat to the kids in school and to everyone in society by the time they're working for a living.  In particular, as Green put it:
Real racism is telling black and brown kids that wrong answers are OK, and thus condemning them to second-rate educations — if that.
They would do much better for their students if instead of that, they told them that "I'm bad at math" is just a myth



16 comments:

  1. Gee, SiG, thanks for sending my blood pressure up....

    So Medical Doctors no longer need Math, too, I suppose? Otherwise how would I even know what a normal range for blood pressure is.

    This nonsense has to stop. We're engaged in a war for our very way of life.

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    1. Since blood pressure doesn't matter hypertension medications can be removed from the market place. Saves a bunch of money and gets rid of those old people, especially old white untermenschen. The Left would not at all mind killing off 150 million Americans to achieve their goals.

      The end game of the Left is to destroy our way of life and replace it with utter control by their elite oligarchy. The Chinese who to some degree still value precision and accuracy will give them, the elite, usable products.

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  2. Math? Right and wrong? Truth itself? How unutterably racist, which is why persons of color need to be paid reparations, unless they're Asian, which is different.

    They're good at math and therefore oppressors and probably white supremacists, even though they aren't white but a kind of yellow. A whiter shade of yellow, perhaps.

    But seriously, get rid of objectivity and all we're left with is opinion, backed inevitably by force.

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  3. Whenever I see the word "unpacking" and it isn't related to hotels or camping, I stop right there.

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  4. At this point the local school board are witch doctors peddling non-sense. Instead, ditch the tax-funded government-planned schools and join a homeschooling group. You can't reform it; you might be able to get out from under it so when it collapses it doesn't squash you. Will the 1,600 billion dollar stimulus bills start hyperinflation next year?

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  5. Sooo.... We should embrace historical aboiginal cultures that never ever even invented the wheel?

    Ah... no... Just because Advanced Calculus broke my brain doesn't mean that I want it to go away.

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  6. My answer is

    https://areaocho.com/why-do-i-need-to-know-this/

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    1. Acknowledged that schools can't fix broken homes. How much has this social dysfunction increased, in proportion and severity, over time? Dad occasionally tells me stories about him and his friends in Highschool, and it seems like an alien world to even my experiences, which are 25 years old at this point.

      Everyone more or less functional or whole. The one or two (out of hundreds) exceptions coming from dysfunctional families with, for example, a drunk father still had a vast social network - the teachers, every other parent on the street, the police officer who knew what was going on, to straighten things out. Kids entrusted with things that I have a hard time getting ahold of today as an *adult*. (Tearing down and rebuilding car engines in metal shop class, nitrate chemistry in chemistry class, about every other kid having a rifle in the backseat of their beater car.) - None of them being irresponsible enough for it to cause (serious) problems.

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  7. My math skills went flat line somewhere during Pre-Calculus, but even though I failed I still know just how important getting the numbers right is.

    Idiocracy is a movie, not a template.

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  8. I had issues with math, but not because I couldn't do math, it was some of the stoooopid questions. Like, a car with a 10 gallon tank, gets 10 mpg, refilled 3 times how far did they travel.... the "correct" math answer, 300 miles, but who ever refilled when the tank is completely empty, just happened to be at a gas station to refill when the car ran out of gas etc... When I taught basics electronics and electricity for the USN, we had answers on tests that were "correct" if you did the math wrong or skipped a step. After every test there was a review where the instructor and students go over the test to clear up any issues. I sort of get where the are going, but doing it for reasons that seem more politically motivated than anything else.

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  9. The point of anything a Leftist does is either to gain power or to weaken their enemies.

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  10. Bug eyed teacher: "Math is a tool of colonialist oppression!"
    Me: "Like sailing ships, steam engines, machine tools, and guns?"
    Bug eyed teacher: "Exactly! Down with the oppressors!"
    Me: "So your advice to someone facing a civilization *with* these tools is to *give up* these tools and stick with cudgels and wishful thinking? Do you really want to go down that road?"

    You'd think they'd reflect, realize the implications, and pass over the fact they'd made the argument in embarrassment, but they're doubling down.

    MadRocketSci

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  11. PS: The reason why bridges are collapsing, planes are falling out of the sky, and powerplants are catching on fire doesn't really have to do with the next generation of kids being raised by "the Comprachicos" (as Ayn Rand labeled them). That wave of damage is still a few decades down the road.

    The reason this things are failing is the nepotistic, corrupt, greedy and stupid mismanagement of our large engineering firms, public utility corporations, etc. Really, anything with more than 10 people and some bylaws has been invaded by some suit with a Gannt chart, and a leftist Zampolit in train.

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  12. My power company sent me an email this morning about how they're "renaming their company to reflect the fact that they've been a part of this big multi-state conglomerate for the past 3 years, and how they're committed to global inclusion and equitable distribution of scarce resources..." bla bla bla.

    I was hoping the lights would stay on a little longer. It's only a matter of time now. Organizations that start spouting that crap *cannot* continue to function in the long run.

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  13. The statement "I'm bad at math, is a myth" is flat ass wrong. Some people TRULY ARE bad at math. Just like some people can't sing, some people can't stuff a round ball through a hoop 8 feet off the ground....there are LOTS of things SOME people can't do well. Math is just one of them. Doesn't make math racist anymore than basketball or singing is inherently racist.

    The REAL issue is the willful dumbing down of society by those holding power in order to facilitate greater and more pervasive control over everyone and everything. Their attitude is basically "to hell with the future, I want power NOW". Most politicians and people in power are simply EVIL.....not "evil geniuses". Power has a terrible attractiveness to people who are inherently nasty on the inside.

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    1. I think you're taking it way out of context. That's not the point of the article. Sure, there are people that are better than others at lots of things, but everyone can get improve their level of performance by working at it.

      When I was a kid, I played guitar in garage bands. As a musician, I'm a good engineer, but more than that, had no desire to be a musician for a living. The life of working musicians just didn't appeal to me. But I still got better by working at it.

      Same with athletics. Only a handful of men in the world are capable of winning the Tour de France, or the Olympic weightlifting gold medal, and the common term for them is "genetic freaks" (or "genetic lottery winners" if you prefer). But everybody can get better by working at it.

      If you're saying if you're not gifted you shouldn't work to get better, you're part of the problem.

      The quote in the article that jumped off the page at me was this:

      "But improving grades was not the most dramatic effect, “Dweck reported that some of her tough junior high school boys were reduced to tears by the news that their intelligence was substantially under their control.” It is no picnic going through life believing you were born dumb—and are doomed to stay that way."

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