By DAVID STOCKER
It’s very interesting that the author states that “all material carries bias of some sort” in response to a teacher’s comment. The comment states that “the material seems biased to me – sort of left leaning.” It’s interesting to me because there appears to be a segment of mathematics teachers who believe that the act of teaching mathematics is neutral. This comment reminds of a required reading on race and diversity by Benedicta Egbo for another class. Egbo states that “some teachers often make claims like ‘I do not see colour; I love all my students; I treat everyone equally; as far as I am concerned, everyone is the same’.” Egbo goes on to say that these claims may be well intentioned, but they are practically unrealistic “since race is often the first thing we tend to notice about people.” There are so many things about teaching mathematics that can be considered as neutral. However, not everything is neutral about teaching mathematics. Indeed, if we were to assume that teaching mathematics is a neutral activity, then aren’t we negating obvious differences among students’ learning in mathematics classrooms?
From my early educational experiences, I don’t believe schooling is neutral at all. And, in particular, mathematics education is far from neutral. For instance, when posing problems, in order to understand the problem, one needs to understand the underlying context of the problem. And not all learners will be able to understand the context of the problems. I remember when I was growing up, we were using photocopies of mathematics textbooks that were brought from the US or Europe. Word problems from these textbooks were some of the hardest problems to solve, because, for example, we had no idea what a pizza was or why would someone bother to divide a pizza into various pieces. At one point or another, I can also remember that those of us who able to understand mathematics better than others were treated like our mathematics teachers’ pets. So I will be very surprised if a mathematics teacher says that teaching and learning mathematics is a neutral act, unless the term ‘neutral’ is interpreted as a long continuum.
I think that the author’s intention in writing this book was to invite teachers to become learners in the classrooms. That is, the author was calling on teachers to wear multiple hats in the classrooms when engaging with the students, rather than being viewed as experts at all times.