Indigenous math

[Susan Penfield]

Amen!  Thanks, Richard!

On 4/22/06, Richard Zane Smith <rzs at tds.net> wrote:
>
> Rudy and Mia raise issues
> the public schools somehow haven't slowed down enought to consider.
> I think Western math ,like everything else is becoming so "specialized"
> that today it creates its own wake of ignorance.
>    Have you ever watched an Asian store cleric using an abacus?
> Compare that image to our typical Walmart clerk on the computer.
> Its obvious which one is actually using math
> and its even more obvious when the computer fails.
> Computers are excellent tools,but mass dependance upon them to
> "do our thinking" can create a very fragile culture of its own.
> Some people still see indigenous cultures as merely offering spice, color
> and frybread. It still hasn't dawned on the mainstream american,that  keys
> to
> survival may lie within the enduring cultures it has sought to replace.
> Richard
>
>
>
> >
> > From: Rudy Troike <rtroike at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU>
> > Date: 2006/04/22 Sat AM 04:16:21 CDT
> > To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
> > Subject: [ILAT] Indigenous math
> >
> > 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
> >
>
> Richard Zane Smith
> 18474 S.Cayuga Rd.
> Wyandotte Oklahoma
>                                   74370
>



--
Susan D. Penfield, Ph.D.

Faculty Affiliations:
  Department of English (Primary)
  American Indian Language
        Development Institute
  Department of Linguistics
  Second Language Acquistion and
        Teaching Ph.D. Program
  Dept. of Language,Reading and Culture

Phone for messages: (520) 621-1836
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