ECS 203: Teaching & Learning Mathematics

• Part 1

In relation to my own education towards mathematics, my experience may not have reached an institutional point of oppression, or discrimination yet there were a few things that walked the line of the two. To put my story short; I was diagnosed with dyscalculia (dyslexia but with numbers) after graduating highschool. I spent many years of my K-12 schooling being told ‘you just need to apply yourself’, ‘you get the equation right, but lose focus with the answer’, ‘you just need to pay more attention’. Many things I did not know was out of my control until it was too late. Dyscalculia is not super known and not very easily diagnosed and often gets tangled in with ADHD (doesn’t help when you have both). Being told that I am not applying myself to mathematics when my equations would be right, I had the right set up, everything; besides the actual correct number itself changed my education and the way I viewed myself as a student. Because of me being told that I wasn’t applying myself when I would try my hardest turned my passion of wanting to learn into anger and hatred for the subject as I was just as confused as the teachers as to way I was not improving, and no one would help or give me answers. My learning disability got turned into a comment on my intelligence. I was not able to learn or understand ‘core’ developments of math because of this, so the rest of my math education became useless knowledge within my mind and turned me away from the subject completely. It wasn’t until I was diagnosed and given tools that math began to make sense. I think about what my education would have looked like if a teacher noticed these things early on and I got the help I needed. My learning disability was ignored and turned into this idea that I was lazy, and no matter how hard I tried I would fail, which is something that was engraved in my head throughout all of my education and into each field.

• Part 2: 

From this reading a few that stood out to me were, the idea of the calendar and how they used it, the idea that mathematics is a universal language and the same throughout every culture, as well as how they teach math. All these things brought up in the article challenge Eurocentric ideas just by existing and being different than what is considered ‘common sense’. With the calendar, using months as moments when their environment change such as ‘when birds lay their eggs’ and ‘when the ice breaks’. Rather than using the calendar to dictate their lives and the movement of them, they use their lives to dictate the calendar. This challenges Eurocentric ideas because rather than an old form created for a different world, Inuit people use their lives to control a constructed idea that is months. The idea of mathematics being a universal language when its not, challenges this idea of our world is very Eurocentric and white and challenges the idea that their way of doing things is not the only way (or correct way) when they pushed to have it be the only way. With teaching mathematics, they use the land and the world around them to be the pencil and paper, rather than a physical one. This challenges the idea of basic, common sense teaching. As said before all of these things push and challenge Eurocentric ideas just by existing and being different than itself.