{"id":2320,"date":"2018-05-31T22:14:40","date_gmt":"2018-06-01T02:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/phdplus\/?p=2320"},"modified":"2018-05-31T22:14:40","modified_gmt":"2018-06-01T02:14:40","slug":"one-thing-i-learned-from-calculus-this-time-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/phdplus\/2018\/05\/31\/one-thing-i-learned-from-calculus-this-time-around\/","title":{"rendered":"One thing I learned from Calculus, this time around"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Turns out that this story actually doesn’t have anything to do with anything Erdos or Darwin said.
Erdos Photo by Topsy Kretts – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=2874719.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Darwin photo from Public Domain, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=3560761<\/p><\/div>\n

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This blog post is about how I gave an assignment that I regret and am embarrassed about. It all starts four years ago, when I gave my Calculus II students a review assignment in which they were supposed to solve calculus problems to earn letters for a key to decipher some quotes, which had been encrypted using a simple substitution.\u00a0I looked for math-relevant quotes on the internet and had found the following:<\/p>\n

\u201cA mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn\u2019t there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first was credited to Paul Erd\u00f6s, the second to Charles Darwin.<\/p>\n

This spring, I dusted off my old assignment.\u00a0 At first I couldn\u2019t find my original key, so I had to solve the cryptoquips myself.\u00a0 I recognized the first quote as soon as I got the word \u2018mathematician\u2019.\u00a0 The second I didn\u2019t remember at all, and had to work out again.\u00a0 As I remembered the second quote, I felt uncomfortable.\u00a0 I realized that since the first time I gave this assignment, I had read a lot more about the idea of ableism\u2014bias against people with disabilities.\u00a0 I was not sure that it was okay with me (or with others) to use the word \u2018blind\u2019 in this way.\u00a0 I have read that the term blind is correct and not offensive in referring to the condition of not possessing vision.\u00a0 It is potentially offensive to use the term to indicate a condition of ignorance.\u00a0Some people point out that the word blind has many meanings, only one of which is sightlessness; I can see what they\u2019re saying, but my rule is to try to avoid any words in my own speech and writing in a way that I know could hurt someone, even if other people think the words should be okay.\u00a0 In my interpretation of the quote, the man is supposed to be blind, as in physically not able to see.\u00a0 However, the man does not actually exist; the quote in its larger structure is a metaphor, which uses blindness to describe something else entirely.<\/p>\n

As I said, I felt slightly uneasy when I read the quote again, but at the time I didn\u2019t fully work this reasoning through. I was in a hurry, and I trusted my past self, so I decided that this use was okay. I wanted to make sure that the quotes were actually correctly phrased, though, so I did a (very) little Googling. I learned that the coffee quote probably wasn\u2019t from Erd\u00f6s at all, but his fellow Hungarian mathematician Alfr\u00e9d R\u00e9nyi. \u00a0Ha, I thought, I will make that part of the assignment!\u00a0 I will ask the students to do some research and figure out if these are real quotes and are correctly attributed!\u00a0 This will be good practice in always carefully sourcing any quote you use. (I cringe now reading this thought.)<\/p>\n

After I passed out the assignment, I started thinking even more about the second quote. I did my own assignment and started investigating more.\u00a0 It turns out, the second quote was also misattributed. On Quote Investigator<\/a>, I learned that the second quote has a long history, and is descended from one that involves racist language\/images. The Quote Investigator entry has a trigger warning at the beginning. I thought, wow, this quote was a terrible mistake.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t make this assignment so that the class could discuss the power of language for good and ill, racism, ableism, or the problematic history and culture of mathematics. My Calculus II students are not likely to have been at all interested in \u2018mathematician\u2019 as an identity, and there was no reason at all to use either of these quotes to begin with.\u00a0 What was I doing, sending my students into this complex terrain, when all I wanted them to do was practice their anti-derivatives? Especially when I had no idea how to unpack the whole thing? I now really regret using the second quote in class, this time and four years ago.<\/p>\n

In some ways, this was a \u201cteachable moment\u201d\u2014a real-life example of how mathematical culture is (obviously) every bit as problematic as culture at large, how innocuous-seeming assignments and utterances can carry enormous baggage, and how well-meaning people can make potentially hurtful mistakes, especially if they try to hurry through and never question their past judgments. As I mentioned, I don\u2019t feel that I have the tools and background knowledge to lead the best discussion on all of this.\u00a0 But I felt that, tools or not, I needed to say something about the assignment in class. I messed up, and I needed to acknowledge that.<\/p>\n

I gave this assignment out on Monday.\u00a0 On Wednesday, the last day of class, I told my students that I was sorry and why.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t have anything to say about it.\u00a0Except one student who asked, \u201cAre we still going to get credit for doing the assignment?\u201d\u00a0 I said yes, and after waiting a while to see if anyone wanted to talk more, we moved on to Lagrange Multipliers.\u00a0 From the response, it seems possible that none of the students found the assignment offensive or distracting, and probably nobody would have brought it up with me if I had just kept quiet. However, I don\u2019t think that would have been the right thing to do. In my classroom, I have power. I am the expert, I give the grades, I get to decide what is okay, and I choose what I\/we talk about.\u00a0 I could tell myself, \u201cIf nobody brings it up with me, nobody was hurt, no harm done.\u201d But that ignores the real power imbalance in the classroom. Since I am in the professor, students would likely not feel comfortable telling me that something I said hurt them. It is hard to speak up. If I can\u2019t bring myself to admit mistakes and speak frankly about difficult things, how can I hope that my students will find the courage to do this, or to tell me when I am wrong?<\/p>\n

I feel that it is my job to manage the classroom climate and call out disrespect. If a student said something I viewed as potentially hurtful in my classroom, even\/especially to another student, it would be my job to identify that as unacceptable, whether the other student spoke up or not.\u00a0 This is actually my number one job, as a person, much more important to me than teaching mathematics: in any situation where I have power, I must use that power responsibly.\u00a0 Whether or not any student in this particular classroom was bothered by the assignment, I was bothered by the assignment, which is proof that it had the power to hurt.\u00a0Therefore it was my job to speak up.<\/p>\n

I have told a couple people about this experience since it happened.\u00a0 Honestly, nobody really seems to know how to respond to me. I can\u2019t tell if people are appalled that I ever thought that quote was okay, or if they think I\u2019m being ridiculously politically correct, or if they think I am moralizing about what they should do in their classroom. I guess the fact that the same thing could provoke any of these reactions shows how complicated this terrain is. After thinking about it for a long time, I came to the conclusion that using the quote was not right. Now that I see it that way, I can only respond from that place. I am not saying that everybody has to see it that way or else be a bad person.\u00a0 I am just doing my best to do what I think is right.<\/p>\n

That assignment wasn\u2019t what I wanted my students to remember about Calculus II.\u00a0 But it is one thing that I will not forget about this class. The math classroom does not exist in a vacuum, and of course we need to reckon with the same issues as the larger culture.\u00a0 For me, right now, that means re-examining everything\u2014including old calculus assignments.<\/p>\n

Thoughts? Ideas? Please share in the comments.<\/p>\n

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                    This blog post is about how I gave an assignment that I regret and am embarrassed about. It all starts four years ago, when I gave my Calculus II students … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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