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Math and Social Injustice

by Jack Ucifferri

When you walk into a typical math class on a typical day in almost any school, you'll notice that most of the students are bored and distracted. That, believes Jonathan Osler, founder of RadicalMath, is a social justice issue.

"Math classes should give students the tools to better understand their reality. Who cares if 'Train A goes x+4 times faster than train B' when your community isn't adequately served by public transportation?"

Traditional math curricula don't teach students how to compare the density of check-cashers to banks in low-income communities, evaluate college loan plans to determine which offer the most favorable rates, or analyze data on rates of diabetes and asthma in communities of color. Lesson plans for addressing all of these issues can be found at RadicalMath.org, a free website for educators interested in integrating issues of economic and social justice into their math classes.

"I believe in engaging and empowing students to learn about issues that are relevant to their lives and communities," says RadicalMath founder, Jonathan Osler, who taught in a public high school in Brooklyn, New York for six years and now coaches math teachers in a public high school in Los Angeles. "But there were no sources of information for how I could integrate social justice issues into my math classes, so I began writing my own curricula and posting it online." Two years later, RadicalMath contains over 800 lesson plans, data sets, and articles, has received over 1,000,000 page views, and has drawn visitors from all over the world.

Osler explains that it is critical for students to graduate from high school with strong math skills, prepared for math-based college majors and careers. But equally strong is his belief that in order to address our country's most pressing problems, young people need to become agents for change in their lives and communities, and math is a tool that can help them do so.

RadicalMath.org contains information on dozens of issues including racial profiling, immigration, global warming, and the criminal justice system. There are also numerous financial education resources and lesson plans on economic topics such as minimum vs. living wage, predatory lending, the mathematics of the lottery, and home ownership.

Last April, Osler, along with several other RadicalMath contributors, organized a national conference to discuss teaching math through a social justice lens. This first annual "Creating Balance in an Unjust World" conference drew over 500 educators, activists, parents and students from around the country to Brooklyn, NY. Osler and the other organizers expect to draw twice as many participants to this year's conference.


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Can the US compete if only 32 percent of its students are proficient in math?

Among the top-scoring places in the world that participated in a recent exam, math proficiency of 15-year-olds was well above 50 percent. One US state, Massachusetts, cleared that mark, barely.


By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, Staff writer / August 17, 2011


What do Massachusetts, Switzerland, and Singapore have in common? Their students are among the top performers in the world when it comes to mathematical proficiency.

As for the rest of the United States, the comparison is more bleak, according to a new report: The US ranked 32nd out of 65 countries (or cities such as Shanghaiand Hong Kong) that participated in the latest international PISA, an exam administered to representative samples of 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

To researchers who authored Wednesday’s report – “Globally Challenged: Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” – it’s yet another cause for alarm about the ability of the United States to compete on the global economic scene.

To read more, click here for the full article.

Getting in Rhythm Helps Children Grasp Fractions

A recent study has found that tapping out a beat may help children learn difficult fraction concepts.

San Francisco State University researchers designed “Academic Music”, a 12-lesson program that uses music notation, clapping, drumming, and chanting to introduce third-grade students to fractions. The program was implemented at San Francisco’s Hoover Elementary School with students showing significant improvements, especially those who struggle with academics.

"Students who started out with less fraction knowledge achieved final test scores similar to their higher-achieving peers," said Susan Courey, assistant professor of special education at San Francisco State University. "Lower-performing students might find it hard to grasp the idea of fractions from a diagram or textbook, but when you add music and multiple ways of learning, fractions become second nature to them."

Courey developed the program with music teacher Endre Balogh. Their findings will be published in the journal Educational Studies in Mathematics.

Original article from MAA Digital Library

Decoding Da Vinci: Finance, Functions and Art

by Tim Johnson

Dan Brown in his book, The Da Vinci Code, talks about the "divine proportion", an irrational number given the Greek symbol , as having a "fundamental role in nature". Brown’s ideas are not completely without foundation. The proportion crops up in the mathematics used to describe the formation of natural structures like snail’s shells and plants, and even in Alan Turing’s work on animal coats.

But Dan Brown does not talk about mathematics, he talks about a number, . What is so special about this number?

From rabbits to ratios

The divine proportion appears in Fibonacci's 1202 book on financial mathematics, the Liber Abaci. The Liber is a series of increasingly difficult problems (with solutions) that generations of apprentice merchants used to learn their trade in the middle ages. It was the textbook that taught Copernicus, who wrote about money before he wrote about planets, and Simon Stevin(1548 – 1620), who made mathematics useful and helped free the Netherlands from Spain.

One of the simpler problems Fibonacci used was on the business of breeding rabbits. Given that one pair of rabbits produces one other pair of rabbits a month, how many rabbits will there be after a year, assuming that we start with one pair?

To read more, click here for the full article.

Calculus Comes to the Rescue in Tylenol Poisoning

Researchers at the University of Utah have designed a mathematical technique to help doctors when dealing with patients who have overdosed on acetaminophen.

Depending on how much the patient has taken, overdoses of drugs containing acetaminophen, like Tylenol, can result in extensive liver damage and even death. According to an article in Inside Science, the drug is the leading cause of acute liver damage in the United States.

Mathematician Fred Adler and Utah doctoral student Chris Remien worked with Norman Sussman (Baylor Medical College) to use computer modeling to make treatment and prognostic decisions.

According to Inside Science:

They used the medical records of 53 patients at the Utah University hospital, taking the results of four common tests, and using eight differential equations produced a chart showing when the patient took the acetaminophen and how much. The equations predict who is likely to survive with treatment and who must have a transplant.

The study was what scientists call retrospective. The Utah researchers applied their model to data in the records of past patients to see what would have happened had they used the equations.

The equations would have predicted that 12 of the patients would die, including all eight that did die. The method correctly predicted 39 of the 43 patients who survived.

Original Article from MAA Digital Library

SAT and ACT Adopt Stricter Security to Fend Off Cheating

Students taking the SAT and ACT will be required to go through some additional security beginning this fall in an effort to address the issue of test-taker impersonation in the college-admissions tests.

The announcement was made at a press conference held today by the Nassau County, N.Y., district attorney with representatives of the College Board and ACT. The security changes come on the heels of a cheating scandal in New York high schools in which students allegedly were paid to take exams on behalf of others.

Nassau District Attorney Kathleen Rice said the lax system in the past allegedly even allowed one male student to take the SAT for a female on one occasion. "These reforms close a gaping hole in standardized-test security that allowed students to cheat and steal admissions offers and scholarship money from kids who played by the rules," said Rice, according to an Associated Press report.

Under the new measures, students must submit a current photo (digital or print) when registering for the tests, and the photo will appear on the admissions ticket for the testing site, according to a press release from the College Board, which administers the SAT.

Supervisors at the center will have a roster of students with their name, date of birth, gender, test type, attending high school, and access to a printable online register of photos. Upon entering the testing site, students must present the admissions ticket. They also may be asked to show the photo ticket when re-entering the test room following breaks or upon collection of the answer sheets.

In the past, students were required to present only a photo ID when they arrived.

The new rules no longer let students on testing day change test centers, decide to take a different type of test, or walk in to take the test as a standby. All requests for changes will have to be made in advance.

After the test, high schools will receive scores for all test-takers enrolled at that school. A registration-data repository will be created with students' information and photos for review upon request by high schools, colleges, universities, and the Education Testing Services.

Original Article from EdWeek.org