Thread by @neagle

I'm genuinely conflicted, as the graduate of a college that does math VERY differently (seminar-based, start with Euclid, fundamentally dialectic), about stuff like this: equitablemath.org

Is the language of equity/race merely kind of a weird but useful frame for criticisms folks from "alt" schools have been making for years of traditional math education? Or is it a really dangerous case of completely misguided principles?

This is not new. From the SNL episode aired 5/16/92:

"Instead of having 'answers' on a math test,
they should just call them 'impressions,'
and if you got a different 'impression' so what,
can’t we all be brothers?"

—Jack Handey

Any St. John's student has spent a ton of time *debating* Math. That in itself is not a cartoonish statement: we start with strange-sounding questions around Euclid's definition. "A point is that which has no part." What does that even *mean*?

We get challenged to think about whether our notion of infinity maps to Euclid's concept of unboundedness. These early questions come up later when we discover that the questionability of Euclid's fifth postulate—that parallel lines never meet—gave birth to Lobachevsky.

Lobachevsky was able to make a geometrical system as logically valid Euclid's based on the opposite postulate: that parallel lines MEET at infinity. Complexity! There are whole universes in the cracks between assumptions we didn't know we were making.

Bertrand Russell unintentionally unseated Mathematics as a possible standard of certainty with set theory. And quantum physics blew apart our intuitive grasp on the world by modeling the behavior of small things ONLY PROBABALISTICALLY.

Leading Einstein to declare with disgust, "God does not PLAY DICE with the universe!" Surely we couldn't believe that little things are really just statistics! But is this history, complexity, uncertainty, debatability best describes as *non-objectivity*?

I dunno: it really feels like it's fundamentally missing the point. It doesn't seem to be about the questionability of things that claim to be certain or the reality that it is better to insist on understanding for oneself than to submit to authority.

Start "accepting" stuff in math and you're lost. "Yeah, yeah, if you say a² + b² = c², I believe you!" (For many St. John's students, working through Euclid book 1, prop 47, where this is *demonstrated* is a transformational experience.)

The didactic mechanisms this seems to suggest often look more like St. John's: conversation, debate, questions. But the rationale for using them seems fundamentally flawed.

@threadreaderapp unroll