On this morning's run I listened to Margaret Prescod's show Sojourner Truth on KPFK. She had a panel of current and former high achieving students of LAUSD talking about the afterschool programs that had helped them to succeed in music, sports, and science. The astrophysics grad student particularly caught my ear with the phrase "leaky pipeline" to refer to the disproportionate rates at which women and minority scientists fall out of the scientist career, at every stage: going to college, selecting a science major, going to grad school, finishing grad school, junior faculty appointments, and moving on to tenure and a long and productive career in science.
Being a roundtable among teens and the people who run programs for them, the discussion turned back down to high school and middle school level interventions and the need to lower class sizes, increase resources like lab space, and ensure teachers for all students, not just the magnet school students, are comfortable and confident with their own math skills. I basically agree with all that but the contrarian in me starts thinking about why math becomes such a thing to be feared for so many people. I recall A Mathematician's Lament, by Paul Lockhart, which tears down the entire K-12 mathematics curriculum as divorced from the pattern finding and meaning making that makes mathematics a beautiful and intricate art for those who love it. He complains about mathematics enrichment programs that in an attempt to get kids up to "grade level", which is to say, able to do certain operations and process extremely specific mathematical concepts at a certain age, push and break kids' natural love of pattern finding and puzzle solving.
It makes me think that what specifically happens in a math/science afterschool program matters enormously, whether it is about creating an open space where math is respected and loved or a cram school to try to cram kids into a pipeline. The former certainly is harder to hire for, since you need to find people who themselves love and truly are comfortable with mathematics as art, conversation, and a tool for understanding, and even many people in the science pipeline don't think about math that way.
Yesterday's menu:
Breakfast: cereal
Lunch: beef salad again
Dinner: lentil soup
Snack: pecan chocolate chip cookies
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