Short Take: Emotional Math

As a mother, Jessica Grose wants her fourth grader to be able to do math at grade level, something American schools have proven remarkably poor at achieving.

As a parent, I read this and felt completely exhausted. Partly because I don’t care all that much about whether textbooks explicitly address social and emotional learning. Good teachers, those who care about all of the students in their classes, incorporate these concepts whether they’re spelled out in a textbook. My fourth grader constantly tells me that “practice makes progress,” instead of “practice makes perfect,” because her school is teaching her to keep working at something even if she isn’t great at it right off the bat.

Whether changing a slogan from “practice makes perfect” to “practice makes progress” accomplishes anything in real life is an interesting question to those who ponder slogans. Sure, it eliminates the aspiration of perfection from the equation, because that’s too hard and not everyone can achieve it, and those who fall short will feel badly about themselves and their lives will be ruined and…never mind.

But a mother wanting her child to learn is hardly controversial. So what’s the issue?

Last month, Florida rejected dozens of math textbooks because, the state found, they “included references to critical race theory” or had “inclusions of Common Core” or “the unsolicited addition of social emotional learning.”

Is this really a problem? The starting point for an answer would be to gain a working knowledge of what’s actually at issue here.

The state did not identify which textbooks the examples come from, but one appears to be from an advanced high school algebra or statistics textbook and begins with the phrase, “What? Me? Racist?” It has students work with data reported by an online test that researchers say uncovers hidden attitudes toward different races.

The other appears to come from a teacher’s guide to a kindergarten or first-grade textbook. The lesson is entitled “Social and Emotional Learning – Building Student Agency”; students work together as they put the numbers 1 to 5 in proper order so they can “build proficiency with social awareness as they practice with empathizing with classmates.”

On the one hand, are these “gateway drugs” to “critical race theory,” as that phrase is amorphously used to describe the indoctrination into woke ideology in the classroom?

S.E.L. is the latest front in the educational culture wars, and it’s painted as a kind of gateway drug to critical race theory by its opponents. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, told Goldstein and Saul that while S.E.L. seems uncontroversial, “in practice, S.E.L. serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogies such as critical race theory and gender deconstructionism.”

On the other hand, can’t students just be taught math without making it a culture war problem?

He said that while we still “stink” compared with similarly developed countries, “we have made huge, huge moves forward in improving the math education of our students.” Decades ago, teachers were trying to cram too many topics into every year of instruction, leading to curriculums [sic] that were a “mile wide and an inch deep,” Schmidt told me. In the 1990s, “except for the elite 20 percent, the seventh and eighth grade was still doing arithmetic, when the rest of the world, even the more developing countries, were covering the beginnings of algebra and geometry. We estimated our curriculum was two years behind much of the rest of the world.”

As Grose notes, while we’ve improved math education, we still aren’t doing well enough to compete with the rest of the world. Are we going to close the math and science gap between American students and the rest of the world by “building proficiency with social awareness”? If we can’t manage to teach students that 2+2=4, should the time available in math class be spent on teaching them that 2+2=5? What if we taught math in math class?

While many can (and do) argue that there is nothing wrong with teaching students social awareness or empathy, there is something wrong when it comes at the expense of teaching math. Is it wrong for a parent to want their child to learn math?