Battleground Schools Response

 My first "stop" was at the table outlining the different modes of viewing math education and its goals. Most of these were familiar divides to me and I knew quite clearly which side I landed on. The last point, though, about "teacher-proofing" curriculum, was not something I have heard before. It really hammers home to me how many challenges arise from the factory model of schooling. This is something I've had discussions about in other courses, so I am glad to be able to make another connection to it here.

The second part of the reading, that which focuses on complicating factors, is essentially the subject of my undergraduate thesis project. Rather than recreate all of the connections that I have, both personal and academic, to the section, I have instead linked the artist statement (which addresses the academic grounding for the artwork) here. If you have a moment, I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts. One connection in particular that I would like to highlight is that between this article and the work of Sheila Tobias, author of Overcoming Math Anxiety. Much of her work deals with a more individual scale, but it touches on the same problems and systems of thought.

As I continued to read, I was struck first by some amount of despair at the thought that the battle between conservative and progressive mathematics education has gone on for so long, despite seeming wins for the progressive camp, when it seems as though every progressive win slides back into conservativism. After thinking that, though, it occurred to me that my own math experiences (at least in secondary school) were largely progressive, inquiry-based, and exploratory. Noticing this in my own thinking, I wondered what had given me the impression that the conservative model still dominated. The answer, I think, is that this model and perception of mathematics is still our cultural attitude towards math, even if the practice in classrooms has shifted. There is more inertia, I think, in our culture than in our classrooms. I'd love to hear what other students' experiences in the math classroom were like to get a bit of a survey (albeit biased) of the current state of the field of battle.