I’m not sure remember that. As a math teacher who works with minority youth in New York City, I was interested in reading about the Algebra Project, a grassroots effort to get disadvantaged students into algebra at an early age.
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What if we look at American corporations in the same way we look at German corporations vis-a-vis the the Holocaust, and look at American corporations vis-a-vis African Americans in the South.
So many of the reviews already written sum up the basic narrative so I'll be brief on that.
His book Radical Equations connects his voter registration work in the 60s and his focus on math education as a tool for organizing. But it’s a tool which you can introduce movement numbers. And so, we had our first meeting in DC last summer, trying to work to get an alliance of schools, and the Fannie Hamer school is part of this to figure out, well, how do we actually get attention to and consciousness of and resources for this problem, focused on the math and on the students who aren’t making it through the system. Love this book for the different historical perspective of people involved in social justice activities in the community. You stop someplace and get off, right? So this turns out to be a huge leap in students’ progress towards algebra, right, that at the beginning of it they have to deal with a different concept of number. So he sent out, you know, notices to parents who were coming to this school and we began doing parent nights with them.
But you look at them, they are all university-based, and of course NSF is a research organization.
The other, which gets not so much play at all, is internal deportation, right, the rounding up of young black men and other ethnicities and sending them to jail, right, mass incarceration. It doesn’t belong to the teacher . I mean, the country is, you know, going through its really issues now, but the Preamble, the idea that “we, the people” really are the people who own this Constitution and it lists a set of common goods that the Constitution and we, the people should address, right.
We didn’t actually call it that. The book discusses the Algebra Project, an organization founded by 1960's civil rights leader Bob Moses, to teach algebra to kids in inner-cities and rural communities. Do they address central kinds of issues?Well, you have a problem.
Unfortunately, I didn't find exactly what I was looking for here. And then the third principal came in and split them up in their senior year. So they had an algebra teacher and we, myself and a graduate student, the issue was that they had an exam to take. Algebra in the 6th grade is the new Civil Rights effort or old since Bob Moses has been doing this for decades. Once it’s implemented and essentially institutionalized, how do you maintain that grassroots quality?So bottom up is what we aim for.
In fact, one of our board members, Shirley Edwards, worked on the Algebra Project and I believe it was in that district with him.So he says to us, well, we want to, we say we want to start in at least one middle school. That is numbers which have two features.
You remember, do you know Circular 3591?Yeah, you can google it.
We went in a Haitian American high school in Miami, Edison, when Rudy Crew was superintendent of Miami and he gave us a high school. High School Mathematics Lessons to Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice (Corwin Mathematics Series) So I said, well, help us. So the idea that within the country, the political force in the country was in line with all these court decisions and everything and the subjugation of African Americans for purposes of both education and, you know, voting.
And so that class, we followed them through for four years. My mother gave it to me... and I ended up with a PhD in Math!!! I need resources so I can meet the demand. It won’t work if it’s in opposition to the schools. And so he did his research for his book, not like an academic, you know, not going to libraries and so forth, but actually going into courthouses and rifling through all those papers and everything.
They organized, the students themselves, organized and won that they should stay together as a class in their junior year.