A math education professor at the University of Illinois says the ability to solve geometry and algebra problems and teaching such subjects perpetuates so-called white privilege.
Rochelle Gutierrez laid out her views on the subject in an article for a newly published anthology for math educators titled, “Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods.”
“School mathematics curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean Theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans,” she says, according to Campus Reform.
She also says that addressing equity in mathematics education will come when teachers can understand and negotiate the politics outside the classroom.
“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as white,” she writes.
Further, she says mathematics operates with unearned privilege in society, “just like whiteness.”
Gutierrez did not respond to an email from Fox News Tuesday seeking comment.
University of Illinois interim Provost John Wilkin told Fox News that Gutierrez is an established and admired scholar who has been published in many peer-reviewed publications.
“As with all of our faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Prof. Gutierrez has the rights of academic freedom necessary to pursue scholarship and research on important subjects and to reach conclusions even if some might disagree with those conclusions,” he said.
He added, “The issues around equity and access in education are real – with significant implications to our entire educational system. Exploring challenging pedagogical questions is exactly what faculty in a world-class college of education should be doing.”
In the book Gutierrez points out that mathematics operates as a proxy for intelligence, but asks, “are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?”
“As researchers, are we more deserving of large grants because we focus on mathematics education and not social studies or English?”
Gutierrez says evaluations of math skills can perpetuate discrimination against minorities, especially if they do worse than their white counterparts, Campus Reform reported.
“If one is not viewed as mathematical, there will always be a sense of inferiority that can be summoned” because the average person won’t necessarily question the role of mathematics in society, she writes.
According to the website, Gutierrez adds that there are so many people who “have experienced microaggressions from participating in math classrooms… [where people are] judged by whether they can reason abstractly.”
Her solution is a call for teachers to develop political “conocimeinto,” or knowledge, to better prepare them in deciding on what learning opportunities work best for their students.
The book, published by Information Age Publishing, is a collaborative effort among more than 40 educators who teach mathematics methods courses for prospective pre-K‐12 teachers.
Fox News’ Caleb Parke contributed to this report.
“University of Illinois interim Provost John Wilkin told Fox News that Gutierrez is an established and admired scholar who has been published in many peer-reviewed publications.”
Actually, the COMMUNIST Gutierrez is a filthy P.O.S. and an enemy combatant against the American National. One day she will hang with all the other traitorous scum who have destroyed our culture and nation.
This is the harshest attack I’ve heard against black people in years. What she’s basically doing is making up a politically correct excuse for black people not doing well in math, and instead of addressing the college admissions policy, the idiot decides to attack mathematics in general.
We have thousands of black doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, and businessmen in this country, so why where none of them “held down” because of their skin color?
When you alter your college admissions policy to allow more black people to enter based on their skin color rather than their achievements, and force white people to adhere to the traditional standards (a.k.a. “affirmative acti0on”), what you’re doing is putting some less intelligent blacks alongside of more intelligent whites, and this will make the black students appear to be less intelligent.
If everyone who entered the college were required to achieve the same entrance standards, you’d have fewer black people, but they’d do just as well at math as the white students.
WELL SAID!
You’re so right, Jolly. She’s defaming the exact people she’s supposedly trying to help.
.
The reason for this–folks like Gutierrez don’t like mathematics because they don’t like TRUTH. And what else is mathematics but TRUTH? (And she doesn’t like GOD either–God did invent mathematics, which is truth—mathematically, God is division by zero, that is, undefined and infinite, the tangent of a 90 degree angle. In calculus, God is the “limit of 1/x as x approaches zero”… But what the heck, let’s blame white folks for this….
“Gutierrez says evaluations of math skills can perpetuate discrimination against minorities, especially if they do worse than their white counterparts,…”
So?
That merely means they’re not as intelligent as their white counterparts.
Guess what, you stupid commie cow… THAT’S LIFE!
Now, do the entire planet a favor… go play on the freeway.
During rush hour.
So. Math is bad since Pythagorus and Euclid invented the basis for geometry because Greeks are Europeans and white. Right, idiot! No mention do you make the ALGEBRA was invented by ARABS in a time when Muslims actually cared about truth before they became a religion that cared more about persecuting women…and, oh yeah, you do know that ARABS invented the ZERO and that ARABS invented the number system we use today. IN other words, NON-WHITES invented the basis for nearly all mathematics we use today, including calculus, invented by Newton and others based on knowledge (mainly algebra) invented by ARABS. White privilege, indeed! IDIOT! And then you have MAYAN concepts of dating and calendars, as well as wheels, CHINESE architectural schemes based on their own mathematical truths (in addition to navigation…supposedly the Chinese landed in California in 1421)…. But leave it to IDIOTS like Gutierrez to leave out folks she just might be related to.