Indigenous math

[Rudy Troike]

This is in response to Mia's note on native math. While it does not
necessarily
involve native language in computing (though it might), it does reveal the
importance of her point about math being culturally embedded, and relevant.

One of my favorite stories is from Barney Old Coyote, who told me of visiting
an elementary school with a number of Crow youngsters attending. He was in
a third-grade class, and the teacher was demonstrating how miserable the
Crow students' math skills were, by showing that they could not do first-grade
arithmetic problems of adding apples and oranges. Barney Old Coyote asked the
teacher if he could take over the class for a few minutes to try out
something,
and the teacher agreed. So he asked the class if anyone could compute the odds
in a stick-ball game, giving them the parameters. The Crow students quickly
responded to a number of these, computing the odds entirely in their heads
with amazing speed. Their Anglo peer hadn't a clue as to how to do this, and
were astounded at their classmates' mathematical skill, as was the teacher,
who had no idea that they could do this.

Culturally-embedded and relevant skills like this, not just in math, often
exist but are not recognized by the formal educational curriculum, nor by
teachers trained only to recognize and teach that, and hence are not rewarded
nor built upon for more advanced development. Relevant here is Perry Gilmore's
famous example of "Spelling Mississippi", in which she found that Black teen-
age girls in Philadelphia, who were failing abysmally in spelling in class,
during their lunch hour were doing jump-rope in which they were regularly
spelling out complicated words using a semi-special vocabulary for letter-
names (e.g. s = "crooked letter"), but the teachers were totally unaware that
this activity was going on, and hence were not able to harness this knowledge
to enhance classroom learning.

Motivation is also sometimes relevant, as when rural development workers in
West Africa found that attempts to teach basic math to farmers was a total
failure, until they hit on the fact that the farmers were regularly being
ripped off by middlemen to whom they sold their produce, who gave them false
information on the weights of their goods. Once they realized that a knowledge
of numbers would enable them to protect their interests, they became highly
motivated to learn.

On the other hand, people can also enjoy the simple intellectual pleasures
of abstract math, and to say that native people can't do this is to greatly
underestimate them. I recall a story by someone who was teaching some mid-
level abstract math to some rural Mayan speakers, and found that they
enjoyed remaining in the classroom after school to challenge one another
with math computation problems, which they treated as an intellectual game.

    Rudy Troike
    University of Arizona
    Department of English