Math Curriculum - It's Assumed That It's Working

At this year's Saskatchewan Understands Math conference, some friends and I were chatting with a seasoned math education professor as we waited for one of the keynote speakers to begin. One of these friends asked for their thoughts on a specific type of content delivery structure that is used by some educators, though I will not mention it by name(it's probably not the one you are thinking of).

The professor sat for a moment, looked at his coffee container, then looked directly at us and said, "It's assumed that it's working".

The math gods seemingly did not want us to ask any other probing questions as a voice came over the speaker system asking for our attention to turn to the front of the room. The conversation was not broached again over the course of the convention, but the phrase has not left my head since.

It's assumed that it's working.

What else can this idea, this phrase that questions both the efficacy and fidelity of a specific structure that we may be taking for granted be applied to? This is something I have been asking myself as I continue working and reading about maths history and its relation to maths education and curriculum.

Now, when using this approach it is not to say that you have to assume that something is not working, but it means that you must approach it from a very logical, some might say mathematical, way of thinking. I have been scouring my books and online resources of Eugenia Cheng, as she stated somewhere that mathematical logic is about having an idea or assumption and then coming at it from varying angles with a hammer to see if it withstands scrutiny and can hold its own, or if cracks begin to appear. I can't find it in this moment, but when I do I will come back and put the reference [HERE]. This is a scary endeavor. It is frightening to come against your own ideas, something that you have invested time, effort, money, and perhaps even your professional reputation into. At best it can prompt you to revise your work, to come up with new solutions to create better end results, whatever that means to you. At worst you are in for a bad case of disillusionment and asking yourself what the point is, a self feeding spiral that can lead to depressive episodes of hopelessness.

These are the sentiments that can arise when you realise that perhaps what you have been doing is in fact not working as intended. But, what about if you realise that what you are doing is working, but not in the way that had intended or initially seen. What happens when you realise that something you have taken for granted as being good, or at worst, neutral, is in fact hiding something insidious. Something that has gone unnoticed by many until it is too late.

One of the things that I have been posing this statement to is the idea of math curriculum in general. Regardless of the varying ways of delivering the content to students, something that doesn't change is the curriculum that we are bound to. More than that, the more standardized testing that we introduce into schools (something that teachers obviously have no say over) the more we constrain the purpose of mathematics education. So my question is, is the contents of the maths that we teach, regardless of the delivery method, working?

Some may answer, no. They may feel that it is inequitable, that it does not teach the full scope of what mathematics is, it doesn't prepare students for higher education and what is expected of them in university/college, etc etc. There are a million reasons to say that it is not working, and perhaps they are all justified and correct. But, perhaps not.

I think that the answer to the question of, is the math curriculum working, is yes. Yes, in fact, the globalized curriculum standards are working.

But, this begs the question(s):

Who, or what, is it working for? Who, or what, does it benefit?

If we frame it from the lens of student understanding, growth, and development as a person, then no, the curriculum is not working.

So then, what lens do we have to look at the globally accepted maths curriculum through in order to find that it is working?

The problem is left as an exercise to the reader.