Curriculum as Numeracy

From my own experience with Math I never once thought of it being discriminatory and I cannot remember a time I though it was. Unless we are talking about being discriminatory to those who do not learn at the same pace, do not understand it, or need more help. The only area I noticed it in was for those like I mentioned before as I was one of them. Math had never been my strong suit but I was always having teachers yell at me or get angry when I wouldn’t understand something and would praise other students when they got something but it seemed as if they were rubbing it in my face. But other then this I would say it was pretty much just a class that involved numbers on a page. Nothing being taught was discriminatory just the way teacher would treat others after the lesson.

For my Math schooling experience, I can only ever recall being taught in the Eurocentric form of it. I have never heard of the Base-20 System and in order for me to understand what it was for this blog post and article reading I had to google it. I feel as if I could have learned about it somewhere in my schooling experience but it does not seem to pop out to me which shows how much the Eurocentric was take over other forms of learning. I also found it shocking when the article stated they did not learn their math skills for everyday use as it would not help them. But in our ways of the world and learning it is something we use on a daily basis even if we do not think or realize we do as it is an important skill to have.

The Inuit way of Mathematics challenges the Eurocentric way of thinking and teaching of the subjects. Three ways it does this are:

• The Inuit’s way of teaching Mathematics challenges the Eurocentric way because instead of counting by 10’s it counts by 20’s so that gets people thinking well why don’t we actually count by 20’s? This creates a challenge with people understanding the different ways of math and makes them question which way is right. Even though both are it is just another way of doing Math and another way of looking at it.
• Another is that the Inuit people teach it in a different way as well. This being said in Poirer’s article he mentions that the Eurocentric way of teaching Mathematics uses pen and paper, this being said everything we do its written down, this also allows for the students to have an example and visualize what to do. However, when he was in other schools, he noticed that the Inuit do not teach their Math by writing it down but they do so through story telling so oral ways of teaching and narratives. They do all of it by talking to the students and not writing any of it down. This pops the questions of “are we doing it wrong or right” or” what makes this way any better or worse than ours”
• The Inuit or any other Indigenous cultures also do not also use the same currency as us in some ways. Such as in Gale’s lecture she stated that in order for the two men to buy the one sheep they wanted two packs of tobacco. They came back with four as they wanted both but the herder said that’s too much for both and this is because the men buying the sheep do math the Eurocentric way so they had the mind though the one sheep is 2 packs so the second will be but when the herder said its too much they got confused and thought the herder cannot do simple math as they saw it as 2+2=4 but the herder was thinking about the size, weight, and maybe gender of the sheep. This challenges the Eurocentric way because it gets others thinking maybe they have a better way set up for this rather then having a set price or seeing everything as equal.