Abstract
Gerry was a Vietnam veteran who had bounced around VA hospitals for a few years before he found his way to the school for adults where I was working. My job was essentially a kind of educational triage. My role at the school was to get students into educational and training programs and to help them establish themselves in these programs, since most had been out of school for a long time.
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Notes
- 1.
I have placed the single quotation marks around ‘mathematics’ once in this chapter to highlight the issue of whether and to whom these practices were rightfully counted as mathematics. For readability, I will drop the quotation marks in the rest of the chapter, but that question “Is it and to whom?” should linger in the reader’s mind throughout (Lynch, 1991; McDermott & Weber, 1998; Stevens, 2000).
- 2.
See Stevens and Hall (1998) for an earlier description of form diversity in mathematical work, showing how productive mathematical work is “embodied” in and coordinated across different bodily modalities and media.
- 3.
“Rather than sympathizing with people who publicly—and proudly—make this pronouncement, it’s time for us to take them to task…Enough, I say!…saying ‘I was never good at math’ is unacceptable…spread the message to delete this offending statement from any social discourse” (Shaughnessy, 2010). I suspect my sympathies for Gerry and Ted, who were anything but proud of their “pronouncements,” would not endear me to the NCTM president.
- 4.
“As the clouds of war gathered over Europe and Asia during the 1930s, mathematics educators in the United States engaged in their own struggle. They sought to restore the place of their subject in the curriculum. Theirs was not a struggle of life and death or for the future of the world, although it would soon come to be portrayed as having dire implications, especially for the future of the United States” (Garrett & Davis, 2003: 494).
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Stevens, R. (2013). What Counts Too Much and Too Little as Math. In: Bevan, B., Bell, P., Stevens, R., Razfar, A. (eds) LOST Opportunities. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4304-5_5
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