Looking back at my schooling back in Abu Dhabi, I was taught math completely differently compared to what how I was taught it here. It was always about memorization and knowing the answers as fast as possible or you where considered dumb. Many times it was never about understanding the material but about just automatically knowing it and being good at it. Thing where very different when I came here, teachers took their time to actually explain the material and make sure that it was understood. For me personally I always flipped numbers unintentionally because in Arabic you read from left to right, and the numbers are said differently so I would be saying it in Arabic in my head and flip the numbers as I am writing it. That of course always caused me to lose marks because of that one stupid mistake, even when I explained it to them that the reason I did that was because of Arabic, it didn’t matter because I still made a mistake when in reality I did not, I just flipped it.
While reading Louise Poirier 2010 article it really opened up my eyes on how differently the world views math. The Eurocentric ways of teaching, understanding, and props of math is about knowing all aspects of math, even if you may never use it in the future, you still need to know it. They also have the idea that math is universal and it is the same world wide. However the Inuit community proved otherwise, math to them is based on things that they will come across on their day to day lives, it is constructed in a way that will allow them to complete daily tasks and succeed in them all and use the resources around them to get what they need. For instance take measuring, they use different parts their body such as their feet or the palms of their hand to measure how much fabric they need to make something. Another big difference is their sense of space, they can measure how far something is by reading snow banks. Which itself is extraordinary that looking at snow banks and the direction of wind can tell them where they are. The last one that I found most interesting is how math is verbal to them, I remember how in school if you did not show every detail you would be docked marks and they discouraged us from doing the math in our heads. But for Inuit communities they do not have a written language so they are taught from the start how to do math in their heads, which in reality is much more useful in day to day life compared to writing every step out. Eurocentric mathematic ways is really useful but it focuses more on obtaining as much knowledge as possible, but Inuit mathematic ways is made to be used on their daily lives.