Home | How It Works | Stats Login | Register         Case: Math and Social Justice! No No! Recently, I read a report in a national magazine on income levels of different groups of people in the US. The report especially featured income differences between males, females and different ethnic groups. Some of the statistics were very disturbing. For example, women holding the same job as men with same number of years in the job made considerably less money in most of the states. Differences between ethnic groups were even more disturbing. I decided to use these data in my math class with my 5th graders in a lesson on graphing. The purpose was for the students to be able to interpret graphs and create graphs using the information provided. Students enjoyed the lesson and learned some social justice lessons. Apparently a lot of my students talked to their parents about what they had learned in class when they went home. I received notes from about 10 parents the next day simply indicating that what I taught in my math class would lead to hatred among my students and that I should not be wasting their children's valuable time. Rather, they suggested, I should teach math with no controversial materials. I completely disagree with them and I plan to use similar materials in my other courses as well. However, my principals asked me to send an explanation to those parents. I know my explanation will not stop the complaints. How should I go about this potentially long battle? Or should I take the short cut simply remove such content from my lessons? Solution: (Rates are posted for this solution!) As an educator, it is our job to present material that allows students the opportunity to take what we have displayed and run with it. Using real life data in your math lesson is essential to helping students make connections with the content. Furthermore, this data was not something that "poofed" up over night. It took many years for these numbers and research to get locked in. I am positive that the social studies curriculum in every grade level touches on injustices and hardships of several different groups of people throughout the course of history, and if anything, you are merely showing the students that this battle is still being fought today. To appease the parents I would contact them explaining what I said previously and invite them to join in on the mathematics lessons at any time. Inviting the parents into the classroom and seeing how you present the information is important as we all know that students don't always do the best job relating a message 100%. After a classroom visit if the parents who do come are still concerned you can always move forward from there.