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Reading your links, I had no idea mathematics had gone to the postmodernists... the world is heading toward a new dark age.
It will be hard to keep real mathematicians down. They'll keep doing math even if universities won't hire them to do it professionally because they're the wrong race or gender.
Kassie Benjamin-******, a teacher in Minneapolis, discovered her love of math in elementary school... she was consistently above average for math—which instilled her with a sense of accomplishment.
Then in high school, her excitement for math slowly turned to disappointment. Benjamin-******, a citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe (a tribal nation in Minnesota), was one of two students of color in her 11th-grade pre-calculus class. When her study partner was absent for a series of days, Benjamin-****** began to struggle with the material and barely passed the class with a D-minus. Her senior year in AP Calculus repeated the pattern—lacking support and feeling ignored in the class, she passed with a D.
“I didn’t have a math teacher that I could go and get help from, [and] I didn't feel comfortable at all approaching my own math teacher,” she said. Recognizing the undercurrent—how her feelings of isolation were related to her race—she admits “those two [classes] really made me question: Do I consider myself good at math anymore?”
This is a little bit similar to my own experience. I was very good at math in elementary school, still pretty good in high school, but mediocre in college. Isn't this what happens to everyone? Even people good enough at math to breeze through undergrad work eventually get to a level they can't really wrap their heads around and find out that, compared to the real geniuses, they're dense after all. Some math problems go unsolved for hundreds of years. They're just too hard, for anyone. I reached my level of incompetence in math, but it never occurred to me that I was a victim. I simply wasn't smart enough to go any further with it. If I experienced any privilege, it was in not being subjected to idiots telling me that calculus was hard because the world was against me, and that if I had been treated fairly I could have breezed through to a Fields Medal.
Second thought: but what about the others like me, who don’t do math the “right way” but could still greatly contribute to the community?
I think I've found the problem. Maybe she helped invent common core math, or maybe she was one of the first test subjects for common core math. Either way, even according to her, people in her field appear to think she doesn't do math the "right way". Whether that means not coming up with the correct answers or somehow managing to come up with the right answers even though the path to get there may be haphazard and/or illogical.
Neither one's gender nor "how they identify" is relevant in determining whether or not they can do advanced math. What IS relevant is whether or not they have the mental ability to do that advanced math. It sounds to me like she wants to dumb down PhD level math to HER ability and style so she doesn't look like the person who was advanced due to affirmative action rather than ability, which probably was the case.
Last edited by KS_Referee; 05-20-2017 at 05:55 AM..
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