Check One

One point of contention for people of mixed race heritage has always been racial reporting on demographic surveys. From my own personal experience and from hearing the stories of many, many others, I know that there is always a strange, uncomfortable feeling that wells up whenever I am asked to report my race. It's not that I'm opposed to collection of demographics--in fact, I feel proud and patriotic when I get to participate in the US Census every 10 years, and am appalled by the recent House of Representatives vote to eliminate the American Community Survey (write your senator to stop the madness!). Specific to racial identification, I very much want people to know how I describe that important part of my identity. But every time I start to read the race question on a form, I know that I am not the one choosing the desctiption. The boxes choose. Who knew that the words "check one" could be so traumatically defining to a young child (or always-growing adult)? Specific memories stand out from very early on about dealing with this question. It was the question on every standardized test that everyone knew the answer to except me. Asking how to fill out that section made you look as stupid as asking how to spell your name (also an issue for me in the standardized testing context). For a mixed person checking only one box means, at best, knowingly providing inaccurate or misleading information. At worst it means publicly documenting which parent you love more or which side of your family you would erase from the past. It means succumbing to the ways that others have spoken for you against your will and admitting to shameful fantasies about about wishing away a part of your very being.

I remember filling out my SAT registration and asking my sister what she marked for the race question. How could I negotiate my desire to follow-rules (you can only check ONE) with my desire to be truthful to both the survey-takers and to myself? My sister's response still drives my box-checking decisions to this day: "I still check both. Sometimes I check 'other' also. If it jams up the machine and they have to read it and enter it by hand, good. Then someone will be forced to notice what's going on." I still check as many as I want, no matter what it tells me to do. That's me, sticking it to The Man. Sadly, as an adult I've learned more about the many ways The Man sticks it back to you and know that whichever data-collector has to deal with my insolence will probably just choose one race for me based on whatever will most benefit the data-collection agency. I have seen this happen at my school when collecting data about my students and it still weighs on my conscience the many times I've not spoken up in defense of kids and their families who were just trying to explain who they are. I'd rather honor the self-identification wishes of a real human being than worry about whether some final statistics will add up to more than 100%.

Fortunately, I have seen change in my lifetime and now it is much more common to see "check all that apply." Of course there are glaring issues with the racial categories one gets to choose from, not to mention the delineation of "Hispanic" as an ethnicity but not a race, but expanding the number of boxes I can check is at least a step in the right direction. I like to think that the data collected from the 2000 US Census (the first time one could select more than one race) provided a positive, affirming demonstration of why this data is worth collecting.

What brought this all up today is a form where I saw something I'd never seen before:

This brought up a lot of questions morally, emotionally, and mathematically. I am going to list a bunch of them, in no particular order, just because it got me thinking:

• I think that being able to select more than one race is always preferable to forcing someone to pick one race, but what number is adequate? Two doesn't seem like enough, but a limit of 15 seems like an unnecessary limit. 
• However, five is still a limit, so is that inherently too confining/controlling? 
• Mathematically, why five? Would a power of two make more mathematical sense? 
• From a data analysis perspective, what are the benefits of limiting someone to five choices rather than not limiting the number of choices at all? 
• How many people actually check five races, especially given the list of options (I only see three out of the 19 that don't fall under the APIA umbrella)? 
• Identifying with five races means going back relatively far in one's ancestry, so at what point in the family tree does one stop identifying with a certain racial identity? 
• What aspects of a given race (and culture) get retained for people in a way that pushes them to identify with that race/culture? 
• At what point in a genealogy do people stop identifying as mixed race and what sociocultural factors play into that? 
• How do positive and negative reinforcement of claiming (or not claiming) a multiracial heritage impact one's desire to do so? E.g. do I choose to identify as mixed race more because it's become fashionable in recent years (positive reinforcement) or because the negative consequences of choosing two races have been reduced? Does the tragic mulatto want to choose one race so he can be fully accepted in a loving community or because he doesn't want to be lynched? 
• How much of the rise in mixed race births is/can be attributed to an increase in interracial couples and how much to a change in the ways we identify ourselves (and the ways that society allows us to identify ourselves)?  

Please feel free to run with any of these questions and write a doctoral thesis out of it. Just be sure to send me a copy.

Super Cute

One of my favorite things about my school is that we have spirit day every Friday. Last week, each mentor group got to choose their own theme. Usually my mentor group (thorough all fault of my own) lacks spirit when it comes to this sort of thing, but this time they were all in. (Maybe because they know that spirit days are one of my favorite things ever?) We voted on a superhero theme, so E. bought masks for everyone and I brought in felt and markers so we could make L's to pin on capes and shirts. Look at how adorable they are! We were by far the most spirited, most awesome mentor group of the day (sorry "Jeans and a white t-shirt" group). 

My favorite part was how much they got into it making the costumes. Multiple kids commented that it was our most focused, most productive mentor time in three years. I do not disagree.  As soon as E. passed out the masks, everyone put them on and got to work. 

 

And then they stayed in costume. Even superheroes have to take tests.  (Another teacher snapped this for me from our office window). 

 

What is... awesome?

Most of my celebrity crushes fall along the usual hot movie star lines, but somehow I developed a massive crush on one skinny, blonde, Mormon trivia nerd. So imagine my delight when I found out that Ken Jennings was speaking about his new book, Maphead, in Oakland.

Morgan and I with my hero:

Best autograph ever:

Another Addition to the Banned List

Awhile back I wrote a post detailing some of the phrases and teaching strategies I would like to see banned from our nation's math classrooms. There are always little things that make me wonder why a teacher chose a certain strategy ("When you multiply by 1 it stays the same because 1 looks like a mirror, so it reflects back the number." Do you think that kids couldn't reason out why multiplying by 1 doesn't change the value?). But there's been a big one coming up lately that's kind of been driving me out of my mind.

"Reducing" Fractions
I understand why we say reduce, especially when accompanied by the phrase "to its simplest form," but I what do you think of when you think of something being reduced? You think of something lessening, you think of it having not as high of a value, you think of it not amounting to as much as it originally did, etc. Kids in the US have a lot of trouble with fractions, particularly with the concept that fractions represent a specific type of comparison of a part to a whole. When one 'reduces' a fraction, an important conceptual aspect is that even though the numerator and denominator change in a way that lessens their respective values, the fraction as a whole does not change in value at all. To say that a "reduced" fraction is equivalent to its original form is kind of an oxymoron--I'd love to see a sale where the reduced prices are equivalent to the original prices. When we use the word "reduced," are we surprised that kids don't understand fraction equivalence?

So what's the better option? Simplify. I love this word for a few reasons. First, it's preferable to "reduced" because it makes sense that a simplified version of something still has the same meaning/value as the original--now it's just in an easier-to-understand form. Second, I want kids/people to realize that any value can be represented in infinite ways, but we prefer some ways because they are easier to work with, compare, interpret, manipulate, or use in a given situation. Would you want to go to a restaurant where a sandwich cost $1-3^(0!)+300/(4x10)? Mathematically, there's nothing wrong with that price; realistically and emotionally, it's just annoying. If we simplify the price (not reduce because the restaurant still wants the same amount of money), we get a value that's more useful for our brains because the simplified value is easier to compare to what we already know about sandwich prices. Is  $1-3^(0!)+300/(4x10) expensive? Cheap? I have no idea until I simplify it to a value that looks like the other values I could compare it to. It's the same reason why we change the form (not the value) of a fraction when we need to add it to another fraction, or why we sometimes factor a quadratic into a binomial and sometimes multiply a binomal into a quadratic, or why we convert linear equations into slope-intercept form. Math is only useful if we can make meaning from it, so we manipulate values, expressions, and data sets until we can mold them into something that makes the meaning easier to find. We're not reducing anything when we rewrite 32/40 as 4/5; we're simplifying it into an equivalent form that's more useful.

Happy Holiday

About a month ago, I got this in the mail:

Unfortunately, I did not heed the urgency of Atlas Pen & Pencil Corp's envelope and once again Pi Day has snuck up on me before I even realized it. But thanks to the nerdy blogs I read and even nerdier company I keep, next yet I will be prepared with an arsenal of Pi Day-related fun. Here, for your celebratory enjoyment:

This is so freaking cool. Is it worth the time to cut out all those apple and pie crust slices? Probably.

Thanks to this useful allocation of government time and money, I now know what "squaring the circle" means. Dear State of Indiana: do not try to legislate mathematics because it is above the law. Or, more accurately, mathematics is the law.

My students were super-excited that they are going to graduate in very important year, Pi Day-speaking. For the only time in any of their lives, it is their senior year of high school when we will get to have a completely legitimate Pi Day on 3.14.15. Some were more excited than maybe they should have been.

Finally, in case you forgot to celebrate today, fear not. There are many more mathematical holidays yet to be turned into Hallmark occasions and/or crappy math lessons. Some seem to be taken a little more seriously than others.

Happy 'Sorry Your Math Teacher Didn't Serve You Baked Goods (Mostly Because She Wants You To Learn The Correct Spelling Of The Greek Letter)' Day!

A Terrifying Realization

I have not left the country in almost 18 months.

Life just starts passing you by and all of a sudden there you are, your passport glaringly devoid of stamps. My passport is not even taunting me because it's buried in a drawer somewhere. Drastic times may call for drastic flight itineraries.

I could use a little of this right about now:

Sometimes high schoolers are cute

I already gave my final exam, so there is now some down time for my kids who don't also take algebra. I had nothing planned for today, so I broke out the pattern blocks. This group decided they wanted to work together to make one giant, cooperative pattern.

Now they are sitting in almost complete silence, completely engrossed. Every once in awhile they discuss what color or shape to place where. Who says that kids today are only interested in constant, passive stimuli?

I love these kids.