Cycle Three Post

“Instead, they have looked back with longing at the curriculum of their youth – a course of study designed for an earlier age and a different people. Impervious to our nation’s pressing need for a new inclusionary concept of curriculum, they have allowed the inability of that old course of study to serve all our children to escape their notice” (p. 43).

Upon reading this quote, I could hardly tell that it was written almost 25 years ago. It seemed instantly relevant to me, as a math educator, given the recent battles over the Common Core State Standards. Many people out there, including parents whose children are learning math in this “new” way, have expressed frustration: “Why don’t we just do it the way we’ve always done it? It’s so much simpler!” Yet these complaints are eliding the fact that many of the pedagogical tools that are gaining more widespread use in elementary classrooms, like 10-frames, are actually designed to make math overall simpler for students by helping them develop their foundational number sense. I can’t find the link now, but I specifically remember reading a blog post from a teacher who talked about the fact that, when teaching her elementary students some math concept (fractions, I think?) with the new curriculum that had been adopted by her school in order to comply with the new standards, she was surprised to realize that it took about half as long for students to demonstrate mastery as it had in the past. On top of that, she recognized that the understanding and skills that her students were developing in working with these equations would serve them well when they began studying algebra down the road.

A number of other elements of this book felt quite relevant to me, as well, and I enjoyed reading it quite a bit. The lengthy discussion of the devaluation of domesticity and women’s work really hit home for me. One quote, in particular, put me in mind of a book I read some time ago (Homeward Bound: The Rise of the NewDomesticity, by Emily Matchar), which I found very interesting and would definitely recommend. It’s not about teaching or even children, exactly, but rather about the rise of “new domesticity” that includes, among other things, the trends of attachment parenting, home-schooling, and other methods of parenting and ways of organizing one’s life that have a very DIY ethos. Near the end of the book, Matchar describes the phenomenon that she had witnessed in all her research for the book: “So many of the women I visited throughout this book sought a simpler, more authentic life through downsizing their careers and focusing on their families and their personal passions. Their motivations for living these kinds of lifestyles were very twenty-first century … But what they wound up with was a life that was, in many ways, not that different from their grandmothers’” (Matchar, pp. 235-236). Compare this to Martin’s line on p. 153: “Woolf … was far too attuned to the psychic damage self-sacrifice does to accept at face value the women’s claim to be ‘truly content’ in her new life – really woman’s old life.” A generation later, and women are facing the same issues in attempting to balance their work and home lives, with many ultimately deciding that they can’t do both, and ending up right back in Betty Friedan's shoes.

In one portion of the book, though, I had some ambivalence. Martin twice cites John Dewey’s well-known quote: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children” (p. 40, p. 45). Simultaneously, Martin wants to establish the schoolhome as a place where gender roles are questioned, domesticity is promoted for boys as well as girls, and students of all cultures and races are welcome. It is not explicitly addressed her, but I think (or hope) that in an updated version of this book, Martin would extend that inclusivity to transgender students and students who don’t identify as heterosexual. There’s the catch, though – plenty of parents don’t necessarily want [transcript] their students in a school with that degree of inclusivity. Now, obviously Martin (and myself) don’t believe that those are the “wisest” parents, but surely they believe themselves to be wise, and their own positions to be the correct ones. I foresee a great deal of conflict, if schools were to explicitly take over some of the social and emotional aspects of raising children and instilling social values in them. How can we approach this goal of establishing an inclusive environment for students (both to allow marginalized students to feel safe, and to enable privileged students to develop empathy for their fellow citizens of the world) without driving parents who disagree to cause huge amounts of trouble, or to simply pull out their kids and send them to a different school (leaving us preaching to the choir, essentially)? I don’t think there’s a single right answer to this question; it’s a complicated but worthwhile goal.