A Topic I'd Like to Explore: Social Justice Math

As a special education teacher in a math inclusion classroom, I have often wondered about the thought process (in the minds of teachers) that goes into the design of hands-on projects for students. I do like the idea of incorporating project-based learning into the curriculum. Many students work best with activities beyond paper and pencil. With hands-on projects, they get the opportunity to use their other “intelligences,” such as tactile, kinesthetic and intrapersonal. Students also can see “real-life” applications of their classroom lessons. My problem, however, is that often the project itself is rather shallow and meaningless.

Now, I am all for fun projects that engage my students. For example, in math, let’s create a cookbook using what we’ve learned about ratios to convert recipes to the serving sizes we need. Let’s create a “Sim” life in which we use basic math operations as well as higher-level thinking skills to balance a checkbook, pay our bills and negotiate shortages in our monthly budgets and brainstorm temporary and long-term solutions to those shortfalls. Let’s interpret distance and scale on a map to plan a virtual trip. These are all clever ways to encourage full engagement of students.

But why can’t math be used to interpret the world? Why can’t it change the world or the least the way we view it? Aren’t we taught that change is good?

Buzz words of the past – “crossing the curriculum” come to my mind at this point. When we cross the curriculum, we are attempting to bring in a variety of curriculum areas for thematic learning. I will never forget the HORRIBLE attempt at crossing the curriculum I witnessed at a middle school several years ago. A grade-level team of teachers created a series of projects centered on the Holocaust. They attempted to have students apply their knowledge of graphing to Holocaust statistics. Students were given the task of creating a variety of graphs using statistical information such as deaths per camp, methods of death, and other information. These young middle-schoolers created happy little bar graphs, pie charts and, worst of all, pictograms with this grim information. The charts were plastered on the hallway walls as a fine presentation of thematic learning. Only after a teacher brought it to the team leader’s attention did anyone consider the insensitive way this information was used, to say nothing of the complete lack of critical thinking skills that went into the completion of this project.

But that is a bad example. What are good examples of using math to interpret the world and affect positive change?

Here’s a term I’d never heard of until last week, when a fellow student in our class suggested an area to explore for our inquiry project. SOCIAL JUSTICE MATH: the integrating of political, economical and social justice into math classes. It is a “political lens” through which we can teach, learn and apply mathematical concepts.

In exploring social justice math through various websites, several questions come to mind:

-How can math be used to analyze and change the world?

-How can math encourage higher-level thinking skills?

-How can social justice issues be integrated into a math curriculum without sacrificing math content?

-How can math help deepen students’ understanding of social and economic issues, at home and afar?

-How can math empower students to be active citizens in their communities and beyond?

-In what ways can math be used to problem-solve local issues and projects?

-How has math literacy been a gatekeeper to educational and personal success?

-How do race and class issues affect the teaching and learning of math?


I am very interested in how social justice math can be incorporated into urban education to enliven math and empower students to connect to the world. The main goal, in my estimation? Firing up young minds to get out there and make change happen.

What No Child Left Behind Means to Me

NCLB is an interesting concept but is poorly designed and orchestrated, and has become a tangled mess of laws, assessment requirements and bumbling classroom implementations. It has actually had the opposite effect of its original intent, to put the most qualified teachers into the classrooms. Apparently the word "qualified" has many meanings and is an easily manipulated term.

Here is what NCLB means to me:

As a special education teacher, I have paperwork (completed by my supervisor and on file with the district and state) that awards me the dubious distinction of "Highly Qualified Teacher" (HQT) in math, science, social studies and english. Now, I have a degree in journalism and a reading specialist certification, among other state teaching licenses. Wouldn't you think I would be best qualified to teach language arts in a special education setting?

NCLB says "not necessarily so."

Of course, I am not teaching language arts. Here's the reason why - brand new teachers, and those teaching a few years, are not generally HQT in all subject areas. This is especially problematic in special education, where we have to teach ALL subjects. Because my coworkers are not HQT in certain subject areas, I am now teaching math and science, both in resource and inclusion settings. I do enjoy these subject areas and feel I am learning and doing a good job, but they are not my preference nor my field of expertise.

That's just one example of a real-life application of NCLB.

I'm generally not a whiner and complainer in my district. I try to fly under the radar most of the time. One of my principals calls me "low maintenance," a compliment of sorts if you consider not causing much trouble a tremendous distinction.

Not to scare pre-service teachers, but just be aware of NCLB and what it could mean for you in the classroom, particularly in K-8 classrooms and in special education settings. Many districts are asking for HQT in subject areas even in the lower elementary classrooms.

Major Influences That Shape Schools

What are the major influences that shape schools, those in urban centers in particular?

I live in a small suburban town with a tiny K-12 school system, from which my son and daughter graduated. I work in a semi-suburban semi-urban K-12 school district, also small.

I think there are many influences that are common to urban, suburban and rural school districts. For example, demographics: where I grew up and where I live, the populations are very homogenous, very little cultural variety. I believe this has a tremendous effect on the shaping of these suburban schools, just as a diverse population has a tremendous effect upon the shaping of urban schools.

Here's my hit list of the biggest influences/shapers of schools:

*Demographics of the community/city
Cultural background, race, educational level, income level...

*Demographics of the teaching staff
Do they reflect the racial/cultural/religious make-up of the schools, or is the staff predominantly white and not reflective of the student population?

*Political ideology of the community/city
Is the party in power conservative, liberal or something in between?

*Reform movements/models (whether successful or unsuccessful)
Reforms put into place in the educational system, whether mandated by the state or voluntary

*Financing
Funding or lack there of; financial support of the schools; federal, state, county, local monies

*Legislation
No Child Left Behind and states' responses

*Media portrayal of schools
Greatly influences the citizens of a community, which in turn influences their votes on key school issues.

How the Media Portray Schools

Boy, some of these are really going to date me!

FILMS

Urban: TO SIR WITH LOVE
There was nothing better than this movie. It was very big when I was growing up. Sidney Poitier played the reluctant teacher in an inner city school in London (1967). There were so many deep themes in this movie – racial conflict, socioeconomic issues, peer relations, coming of age struggles, sexual issues, to name a few. Also, the whole swinging England, mod, Beatles, Twiggy thing was huge, and the styles/fashions were fun to look at. The best part was Lulu’s song, “To Sir With Love,” which became a top pop tune in the U.S.

Suburban: FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH
A little later in my moving viewing career, this film (1982) was THE burn-out suburban teen movie. It was basically the lives of a group of suburban high school students and their forays into sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Sean Penn was hysterical as a druggy surfer. There were some very “deep” themes under the silliness – teen drug use, teen pregnancy, teen angst, and every coming of age issue you can imagine. It really portrayed the generation gap well.

Rural: BYE BYE BIRDIE
Ann-Margret singing and dancing her way through this kooky movie (1963) – she just ate up the screen. Conrad Birdie was an Elvis-type who got drafted into the army. His promoters created a contest in which the winning small town teenage girl would get to plant a big kiss on Conrad on national TV before he left for the service. Naturally Ann-Margret was chosen. I’d say this movie was kind of a cultural icon of small town high school culture as viewed through the eyes of movie producers of the times. The plot was simple and dopey, and was strictly a vehicle for the music and dancing. But it was the best. I loved it.

MUSIC

Urban: THE NEW GIRL IN TOWN (from the musical “Hairspray”)
This musical (2007) is set in gritty urban Baltimore in the early 1960’s. The plot centers around a young girl’s efforts to integrate a popular local television dance show. This song is about some girls who are nervous about keeping their boyfriends away from the hot new girl in school. The girls warn others about this girl, and threaten to run her over with a moving van and punch her lights out after school. It sends the message: Welcome to my school, hands off my man, and this is how we deal with your type in the big city. I guess she’s not in the suburbs anymore.


Suburban: SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER
This is a real oldie (1959). It was the classic end-of-school song. A boy and girl were saying goodbye at the train station because school was out and they were going off on vacations with their families for the summer. What a tragedy! Would a summer love break them apart, or would they reunite back at school in September?
What an innocent time, when these were your biggest problems.

Rural: BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL
This Beach Boys song (1963) was written as an idyllic tune about a jock who’s trying to tell kids not to put down their school. It’s all about the small town school happenings – the pep rallies, the football games, cruising, and other rah-rah-rah stuff. For the times in which it was written, it was very cute, catchy and to the point. A teenager’s whole life was supposed to revolve around his school. What he did in school (played football, dated the head cheerleader) gave him his status in that community. Cliché, yes. It’s an idealistic trip down memory lane.

TELEVISION

Urban: WELCOME BACK, KOTTER
This sitcom was the quintessential city school show (1975-1979). It basically centered around a group of tough underachievers called the Sweathogs lead by head hoodlum John Travolta. I guess nowadays this would have been the resource room. The teacher made good connections to the students, showing that educators can have a great impact upon students if they make the effort. Curriculum was secondary to the personal impact a good teacher could have on students. Aside from that, the show was all about the stereotypes: the tough, poor, bad students; the dumb, ineffective, uncaring principal; the idealistic teacher who wanted to give something back to his alma mater.

Suburban: MY SO-CALLED LIFE
This was a short-lived series (1994-1995) about a teenage girl’s personal journey, set mostly in the high school she attended. Claire Danes played the starring role. The show covered many important issues in a teen’s life – parent conflict, sibling conflict, dealing with a variety of friends and their issues, coming of age as a sexual being. It was well-cast, and characters were not flat stereotypes but very well-developed and believable. Perhaps because of this, it was critically acclaimed but not a winner in the ratings.

Rural: THE FACTS OF LIFE
This series had an incredibly long run (1979-1988). The story line centered around a group of young girls and their trials and tribulations at a boarding school out in the countryside. Within the group of seven girls, there was a spoiled rich brat, a tough hood from the city, an overweight girl, a cute and gossipy African American girl, among others. The point of this show was mostly to portray different girls with their own unique personalities and their struggles to fit in to a new school setting as well as live with each other in close quarters. I think the most difficult thing for the producers of this show was that the actresses were actually growing up and changing from young girls to young adults. This show dealt very lightly with some themes such as obesity, cultural differences, and socioeconomic differences. It seemed like it was more intended to entertain and charm the audience rather than delve into anything too deep.

NEWS

All my news stories related to schools seem to be disasters. They are the stories I can’t get out of my head. Sorry about the doom and gloom.

Urban: THE SETON HALL DORM FIRES
I just read a book about the three most seriously injured students in the Seton Hall fires (2000). It was a huge reminder that although this was nine years ago, these lives were lost or changed forever because of a stupid prank gone wrong. At the time the dorm fire happened, my own children were still in public school. But five years later as my daughter set off for college, I remember having a mild panic attack over the thought that I could not keep her safe. It took a tragedy like this to educate America about school fire safety codes.

Suburban: COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTINGS
The Columbine High School shootings (1999) stand out the most in my mind. It was the school shooting incident in my teaching career, and made me realize how dangerous being in a school facility can be. Being in a suburban school district, this was just not supposed to happen. Students and staff were supposed to be able to come to school and feel safe. This massacre brought to light the “goth” subculture, and the potentially dangerous outcast status many teens experience in school. Another notion that was toyed with by the media was the sheer size of the school. Were enormous regional high schools really a great idea, placing so many students in one building?

Rural: AMISH SCHOOLHOUSE SHOOTINGS
Another school shooting was at the West Nickel Mines School, an Amish school in Pennsylvania (2006). I was always struck by the quiet and simple lives of the Amish. They don’t seem to want anything from the modern world, and simply ask to be allowed to live their lives as their beliefs dictate. It always seemed to me that they were a very protected society that was insulated from the evils of society. But when this incident occurred, it seemed all the more shocking that they were not protected at all, but were actually sitting targets, alone, out in the countryside. I thought the Amish people’s message of forgiveness was a beautiful response, but the tearing down of the schoolhouse said it all.

Frames of Reference

My family was a station wagon full of New York transplants. In fact, my entire suburban childhood was spent around children of New Yorkers who escaped the boroughs in a massive white flight to New Jersey communities. Every one of my friends and school mates had a New York connection, foreign-born grandparents, and a story of the decline of their old New York neighborhood, as told to them by their parents. New York City was a cultural mecca, a place to see a Broadway show or a concert, visit a museum, or dine in a fancy restaurant. But it was not a place to raise kids, in our parents’ eyes - Great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

I attended a brand new elementary school, fifties-style “modern” surrounded by truck farms, wheat fields and a dirt road that was soon to be paved and named the Garden State Parkway. My teachers were either really old – forty something! – or straight out of college and model-beautiful. One lone male taught in the building, and of course the principal was a man. We were in awe of Sputnik, feared the Russians, hid under our desks in preparation for “the bomb,” and feared the “new math” that never came. My life and my school experiences were suburban easy. My only real difficulty was finding my way home on the winding streets, where every house, car and tree was identical to the next.

A favorite family story is my mother’s elementary school experiences, which she loved to tell and we loved to hear about. Growing up in Greenwich Village, she was the daughter of a night club owner. My grandparents decided that the neighborhood schools were not safe enough, or good enough, so they enrolled her in a nearby Catholic school. Being the only Jewish girl in the school, she attended only the academic classes and was allowed to skip the religious mass and instruction. She graduated at the top of her class, and was the class valedictorian. Of course the moral of the story was that city schools were so bad that a little Jewish girl had to attend a Catholic school to be safe, educated and basically to survive.

My father’s tales of being brought up in Brooklyn and attending city schools were pretty grim. The parents tag-teamed my brothers and me, and we believed with all our heart and soul that suburbia and its safe, clean, homogenized schools were fantastic. Beware the big bad city!
I did grow up just a little bit after high school, traveled and studied around the country and around the world, and found out there was a life beyond my backyard. I was in awe of kids my age who lived so differently from me. I remember being so curious about many of the Native Americans and Mexican immigrants who attended the University of Colorado when I was there. Their lives were difficult, funding was difficult, cultural transitions were difficult. I saw something unique and so different than what I grew up around. My journalism experiences after college took me to small newspapers in the Midwest, where I encountered the rural poor for the first time.

Looking back, I know I had tremendous opportunities, more than others would ever have, but I never really questioned or deeply considered what urban centers, urban life and urban education were like for people. I lived what I lived, had limited exposure to urban life, and was basically hard-wired to believe that the only way to live in an urban area was with a ton of money to pay for private school tuition for my children. City life was only a good thing if you could throw a lot of money at it. It was so much easier – and cheaper - to live in small town New Jersey and put my kids through school systems similar to what I came up through. My husband, who grew up in the rural Midwest, had no city experiences at all, and lined up behind the notion of safe, suburban living.

I didn’t think about the urban educational experience until I began to study in a post-B.A. program for my educational certificates. In a small suburban Catholic college, I was asked to consider what my beliefs were about education - my own educational experiences, preconceived notions and personal feelings regarding urban versus suburban school systems and aspirations for teaching in my own classroom. It was there that I learned that my childhood experiences, my family background and the beliefs I fostered based on my parents’ experiences would actually affect the kind of teacher I would become.

While taking a course at Montclair State University I had the opportunity to work with middle school students from a charter school in Paterson through the Silk City Media Workshop project. We met with a group of boys and girls weekly at the Passaic County Community College satellite in downtown Paterson. Despite my very suburban upbringing I didn’t feel apprehensive at all about entering and working in Paterson. As a child I had spent quite a bit of time visiting family and friends in working class neighborhoods of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I developed strong feelings about urban centers as places where large numbers of people of many cultures, ethnicities, religions and socioeconomic backgrounds live in close proximity. These centers are like human laboratories that foster relationships, interactions and experiences, good and bad.

At the workshop project the children were writing, directing and filming video stories of their own creation. The videos ran the gamut from family issues and difficulties, personal experiences with friends, school and classroom experiences, to fantasy, ghost and horror stories. Working with the children on their videos was the “curriculum,” and learning about the kids and making personal connections with them was the “hidden agenda,” the part that really mattered the most.

The young participants in the Silk City Workshop were motivated students whose families sought to provide a better education and plot a more positive course for their futures by enrolling them in a charter school. I realized these children and their accompanying teachers did not exactly embody a complete picture of urban education. Urban schools are a slice of life. They are educational centers of excellence with many positive experiences to be gained. They are also the underfunded, neglected, corrupted and dangerous schools of impoverished inner cities, where few survive and profit. Urban school teachers can be the most dedicated teachers in the profession, the most burnt-out and cynical teachers or anything in between.

As a pre-service teacher, I had a preconceived set of notions about what the classroom would be like. I was working as a public relations consultant for the same community in which I would soon student teach and eventually be employed as a teacher. In my job as a consultant, I primarily dealt with elected officials and other employees of the borough hall offices. My dealings with the community were very scheduled, structured and proscribed – meetings, events, etc. Based on the people I interacted with on this job, I assumed that the community was very middle class, very comfortable, with basically intact nuclear families – two parents raising children.

I applied to student teach in this community because I had a comfort level here, knowing many of the town’s residents and the social and political structure of the town. My preconceived notions were about to be challenged. Although the community is considered suburban, it has many rental apartments that are (were) reasonably priced, is on the border of Bergen and Hudson counties, has quick access via public transportation to Newark, Jersey City and New York City and has a very diverse population culturally and economically.

Although this community was semi-suburban, many of its residents were from the cities – Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Newark and Jersey City. Not surprisingly many students had attended large urban schools at one time or another in their educational careers, or had parents who attended urban school districts. Many of the district’s students were very street smart and savvy, very oriented to and accustomed to city life. Some were hardened and difficult to connect with and teach. Many had been thrown out of one or more schools, and some had been through the juvenile courts and detention system. I began to feel that these students were a combination of their environment and the way they were hard-wired, as are all human beings. Many fail and many succeed, some because of the advantages or disadvantages they experienced, and some in spite of those.

As a student teacher at the elementary level, I never thought I would hear war stories or see battle scars like I did. I encountered multiple challenges, the most surprising of which were the difficult lives many of my young students led. It was quite an eye-opener for me. This so-called suburbia on the outskirts of a large urban center had its struggles.

At this point in my early teaching career, I began to realize that the child was the sum of his/her entire life’s experiences. These children came into the classroom with everything they were about and everything going on in their lives. Teaching was not just simply working with the curriculum. I had to make human connections with the children, connections which were more important than the academic content.

I also realized that I was going to learn as much if not more from my students than they learned from me. Even now, 14 years into my educational career, I have that moment once in awhile when I am very grateful for being given a glimpse into the inner workings of one of my students. Once in awhile they open the door and let you into their world, their culture, their minds. It’s what makes the job worthwhile – and possible. Every student I’ve ever taught has changed me.