Multi-colored Math, Sensitive Science

Fox News ^ | 11/22/02 | Joanne Jacobs

[jimkress]

Native Hawaiian students will be taught Hawaiian-style science, technology, engineering and mathematics, thanks to a National Science Foundation grant to the University of Hawaii at Hilo.

Advanced classes would include rain forest restoration, volcano studies and "ethnomathematics," which would look at the math of Hawaiian navigation, symmetries in Hawaiian textiles and spatial relationships in fish nets and knots, for example.

[jimkress]

As Miyake notes, students of Asian descent learn without abacus training. Dutch-Americans don’t need dike and windmill problems, nor do Italian-Americans do math with Roman numerals.

LOL!

What a great line!

[LiteKeeper]

dittoes

[Lizavetta]

It appears that the government schools are determined to produce a generation of WalMart greeters. Thank goodness for homeschooling that allows us to bypass this sewage.

[PsyOp]

So much for math being the universal language. Someone better tell the folks at SETI they are wasting their time trying to contact aliens using mathematics, since that are not presented in the alien's cultural framework.

[DBtoo]

This article caught my eye because we live in Alaska and a similar thing is going on here. They are trying to teach math and science to the natives, and not too long ago someone from the university wanted to implement a program where they teach math and science using body language! They also want to teach using fish and native topics thinking the students may understand the material better that way. But I can't see how to teach scientific notation and chemistry and such using body language and fish. If I were native I would feel insulted.

[RAT Patrol]

Flag!!!