Understanding Numeracy – November 30

            I have never been a big fan of math, and I am not the best at it either. When I was in grade one, my teacher told my parents that I might have a learning disability at the end of the year, and two years later, in 2006, I was diagnosed. Growing up with a learning disability did not help that my ‘love’ for math at all. I barely passed math while in elementary school, and I took the “easy math” during high school. One of my grade four teachers was being horrible to me because I could not figure out how to do the multiplication or division. My brain could not understand how they were even possible, and I was so confused about how some students were so good. My teacher would end up calling me out in class, knowing I could not answer correctly and laughed when I would get the answer wrong. My other grade four teachers also knew that I could not do it, so she would take time after school to help me. We would be at school from anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour and 30 minutes. I would not have passed my grade four math class, if it was not for my second teacher. She taught me maths in different ways than the other teacher, so I would understand it and know what I was doing. She would help me redo tests and assignments if I had failed them. The rest of my teachers from grade five to nine, they did not care if I knew what I was doing or not. None of those teachers cared if I failed or passed. I was supposed to be provided with extra support, but I rarely got it, only ever received it during tests, which was helpful. For those years, I did horrible in math; I nearly failed grades due to how low I would score in math. When grade ten and eleven came around, I was in workplace math, and my teacher was so good to me and made sure she helped every student individually. She somehow knew when I was struggling the most on a problem because she would come over and talk about it with me; it was great. I had not had a teacher like that since grade four. Some teachers enforce a particular way of teaching math, but it can be so much simpler.

           The first way that the Inuit mathematics challenge Eurocentric ideas is language/counting. Each language has different numbers, and some may not be the same as what we would be taught, so the students learning it in their native tongue, in this case, Inuktitut, French and English. They counted on a base-20 numeral system, which could be challenging for some. The second way would be localization; they challenged the Eurocentric ideas of math and how students learned. For them, the Eurocentric way of learning math was very different from what they were used to and untraditional. The last would be measuring, “The first measuring tools were parts of the body (the finger, the foot, etc.).” (Poirier 60). To this day, they still use certain body parts. European settlers would not take on that concept of measuring.

Poirier, L. (2007). Teaching mathematics and the Inuit community, Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, 7(1), p. 53-67.