Weblog 7

Rethinking Mathematics by, Eric Gutstein and Bob Peterson
This book is a resource for teachers on how to teacher social justice through math. This is a very informative book with many great ideas for lesson planning. It incorporates many aspects of social justice by analyzing statistics and numbers. Included in this resource are many different aspects of social justice and many different math topics. For example, there is a lesson about making a graph comparing which presidents owned slaves and how many. There are also many lessons that get the students involved in their own community. I plan to use this book to create a webpage that gives other math teacher insight on how to incorporate social justice into their classroom. It also has many great ideas on how to get students to realize how power numbers are with issues of social justice.

Gutstein, Eric, and Bob, Peterson, eds. Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers. Milwaukee, WI, 2006.

Weblog 6

I think that there is a lot that goes into student achievement. I believe that the most important aspect is that the content is cultural and developmentally responsive. Especially with middle level children who are very egocentric at this point in life. If the content is not relevant to their culture and their everyday lives, they are not going to have the motivation to achieve. It is also very important to make sure that I do everything in my power to make my students understand that they can achieve. I loved the story in the book about the one candidate who gave a student a book to take home so his friends did not make fun of him for doing well in school. This also ties into cultural competence, the idea that the only intelligent black person on TV is Urkel and no one wants to be Urkel. It is very important as a teacher to understand specific practices in other cultures. For example, the story Dr. Storz told us last year. A Hispanic student at his school had been sent to his office for getting in trouble in class. Dr. Storz did not understand why the student would not look him in the eye when he was being reprimanded, and he became very frustrated. The student then explained to Dr. Storz that this is part of their culture, to look them in the eye is considered disrespectful. This is a great example of how not having cultural competence can get in the way of my teaching in the classroom. Lastly, with sociopolitical consciousness, I believe it is very important to get the students actively involved with their community. It is a very good idea to get students involved in projects that help with social inequalities in their community.