Mathematics is typically a huge part of schooling and is seen as one of the major subjects. I find math to be a subject I enjoy and is something I could say I’m fairly okay at but it hasn’t always been like this. Throughout middle school, there was great emphasis on memorizing and just knowing the answer without having to take time to figure it out, however, I was not one of those students and I fully struggled with that portion. This aspect of math very much went against how I learned, and I can say that I never fully learned my times’ table as my teacher gave up because I took too long to learn it. To be so fully against other styles of learning, as well as taking the time to work on harder subjects was something I saw a lot of during my time in school and is what made me and others struggle to grasp concepts and is something very oppressive in school. Keeping a “my way or the highway” mentality when teaching, especially in an area such as math, will simply not work as there are so many subjects/ways to teach that to maintain a mindset such as that will only oppress the students.
Looking into Poirier’s article, the three ways I found that Inuit challenge eurocentric views were
- keeping a 20-base system
- their way of learning math is oral and inside the mind, not on paper
- they have a different way of measuring, and sense of space
Hey Kari! I can totally relate to feeling confused or left behind in math classes and I feel like that is something that many students struggle with but it is never addressed by teachers. I had never realized when I was in high school how oppressive math truly is, and reading about Inuit ways of learning and teaching math has only emphasized the fact that mathematics is incredibly biased. I found it really interesting that Inuit math is focused on the mental side rather than on copying and writing formulas, and I feel like that way of learning math would be much more beneficial for students to be able to understand the ideas they are being taught.
It does seem like math is prioritized in schooling, similar to how English is in regards to how much time is allocated when it comes to lesson planning. I resonate with you about struggling with math in primary school, I was never super confident in math and which created barriers in my enthusiasm and progression. It is interesting now, to take university level math classes and observe how some professors are promoting different ways of solving problems, which is quite different then how I remember math in primary and secondary classes. It seems society is so fixated on base 10 and 12 that we forget how math can not be limited to one way of doing something.