It seems, luckily, that Joe Biden took office just in time. This climate change thing might be real after all. And the education system is even worse.
From sea to shining sea this week America has been covered in white powder. Staying warm has never been more important. Where is the global warming that we all need right about now?
While Joe is fixing that it looks like the education system is bound and determined to fix not the white powder problem, but the white power problem.
On the far left coast, the Oregon Department of Education is seeking to root out white supremacy in mathematics, manifested by an emphasis on “getting the right answer” and making students “show their work.” Oregon’s progressive Department of Education has furnished educators with an 82-page training manual titled “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.”
The education department mailed the manual to teachers as part of Black History Month.
The manual enumerates signs of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom.” “In order to embody antiracist math education, teachers must engage in critical praxis that interrogates the ways in which they perpetuate white supremacy culture in their own classrooms, and develop a plan toward antiracist math education to address issues of equity for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students,” the manual declares.
“Praxis” is a noun that means “accepted practice or custom” in case you needed to look it up like we did. That old-school education apparently does leave some things to be desired after all.
What the manual never addresses is how dumbing down mathematics will magically eliminate “mathematical inequity,” a counterintuitive proposal if we ever heard of one. Nor does it address the racial overtones of why it would need to be so.
We wonder what type of math is taught in other countries. Isn’t math, math? Maybe one plus one does equal three after all.
But wait, there’s more!
Three time zones over, a NY school principal is taking higher education to an even higher level. East Side Community High School Principal Mark Federman reportedly sent a survey to white parents asking them to identify their level of whiteness.
Federman is asking parents to “reflect” on their “whiteness” — passing out literature that extols “white traitors’’ who “dismantle institutions,” education officials confirmed to The New York Post on Tuesday.
The offensive at the East Side Community School in Manhattan features a ranking list titled “The 8 White Identities,” which ranges from “White Supremacist’’ to “White Abolitionist.” You can click on the link if you wish to see who you are and how much woke your wokeness has or does not have.
So we have a white principal, who knows white privilege when he sees it, sending homework home for his student’s parents, who don’t see it, to do. Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?
The racial makeup of the student body at East Side Community is 55 percent Hispanic, 18 percent white, 15 percent black, 10 percent Asian and 2 percent other during the last school year. Isn’t the categorization of “other” offensive? We digress.
The assignment was sent home to all parents. So we wonder how 82% (the nonwhite) of the parents felt about the characterization, the assignment, and how they graded out. Who knew nonwhites fell into one of these eight whiteness categories as well?
How did we get here? Once upon a time, there was a little red schoolhouse on top of a hill. If we built the same today there would there be a debate about the paint color?
The white powder across this land will soon turn to slush. Joe is up to the task of making it so.
We hope the minds of our young ones across this land won’t soon turn into mush. What a task that is.
From this point of view, the change in education is far more extreme than the change in the climate. And, as a reminder, it’s record-breaking cold outside.