I was irritated that I couldn't extract data from PDFs in a similar way to web pages + BeautifulSoup, so I built a library that (kind of) does just that[0]. It does a bunch of other nonsense, but the main goal is a more "human" way of interacting, e.g. `page.find('text:bold:contains("Summary").below().extract_text()`.
And since every PDF is its own bespoke nightmare, I'm also trying to build up a collection of awful-to-extract-data-from examples to serve as the foundation for a how-to library[1].
For anyone interested, I think it's probably worth actually digging into Equitable Math's "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction" [0]. I just skimmed some of it based on your link, and the majority of it just reads like "stop teaching math poorly." I was looking for some real burn-down-the-establishment stuff, but it's honestly pretty prosaic. For example:
> "There is a greater focus on getting the "right" answer than understanding concepts and reasoning."
Probably most people would be on-board with the idea that concepts/reasoning are more important than blindly getting to the right answer, but "right" in quotes seems like a tell that some math-is-objective nonsense is on the way. Reading further, though, it turns out it's just talking about how word problems can be imprecise!
> "Math is taught in a linear fashion and skills are taught sequentially
without true understanding of prerequisite knowledge."
This seems like the flexibility the other commenters are gunning for, even if California isn't on board with it.
> "Rigor is expressed only in difficulty."
I immediately thought, ugh, they're just trying to dumb everything down! But if we read further:
> "Too often in math, we limit the definition of rigor to difficulty, rather than its full complexity including thoroughness;
exhaustiveness; interdisciplinary; and balancing conceptual understanding, procedural skills and fluency, and application. This allows math teachers to shy away from complex problems and tasks and instead streamline teaching like we are spoon-feeding..."
A thorough, conceptual understanding is superior to a surface-level ability to step through a process without understanding? Sign me up!
I poked around for anything more aggressive, but from what I can tell that's generally the vibe of the PDF. Yes, the framing is unnecessarily antagonistic, but if we took the white supremacy dressings off of it I doubt the ideas inside would be divisive at all.
Of course, I've only skimmed that one document! But if "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction" is this inoffensive I'm not sure where they're hiding the real good stuff.
The recommendations are very sane. Actually I would say they are so obvious they are nearly cliche.
The controversial stuff is not stated explicity: Removing advanced classes, forcing all students to adhere to the same curriculum, and grading based on subjective criteria are what people are upset about.
It's a typical motte and bailey switcheroo: put some generic language in a document claiming something like 'rigor expressed only in difficulty' to conceal the reality of what is actually happening.
The Common Core for math, which is adopted in the majority of US states, emphasizes deep understanding of underlying concepts over rote memorization. The reason why we aren't arguing for the Common Core to adopt "better teaching" is because that would leave out the most important mechanism — that every child under Equitable Math must be at the same level.
Without the requirement that all children must be at the same level, some children would still race ahead, and in terms of appearances, that would severely risk the reputation of Equitable Math as the way to fall behind. The battleground is not on whether the Common Core should be deeper, or even whether the Common Core ought be reformed at all, but rather that all children should be at the same level.
Page 7 is where they completely lose me. "Students are required to “show their work” in standardized, prescribed ways" is a manifestation of white supremacy?
If you click on that item, it takes you to a page where they suggest non-standard classroom activities like "Have students create TikTok videos, silent films, or cartoons about mathematical concepts or procedures."
I'm pretty open minded about education pedagogy, but you completely lose me (and 99% of teachers) when you suggest creating TikTok videos so students can adequately express their mathematical understanding.
> "Students are required to “show their work” in standardized, prescribed ways" is a manifestation of white supremacy?
“White supremacy” is an accurate but excessively polarizing term; “cultural favoritism in favor of status quo elites, whose preferences and cultural practices are encoded in the prescribed methods of demonstration” would perhaps both be less inflammatory and easier to see the connections between the specific practice and the broader problem.
> I'm pretty open minded about education pedagogy, but you completely lose me (and 99% of teachers) when you suggest creating TikTok videos
I think the particular examples are not because any of them are individually to be preferred but because providing a range including them illustrates the general principle, which is “provide students a broad set of mechanisms to demonstrate understanding rather than a narrow set of forms, as the latter introduces cultural biases based on comfort/familiarity with the form, both for the child immediately and among parents and the rest of the support network on which they rely.”
Say there's a real problem, the police are killing people. Instead of solving that... well few of us have any power over that, so instead we resort to changing things we do have power over.
Like… watering down math classes and pretending that is even the thousandth thing on the list of solutions that should be tackled first as a response. It's so far down the list (and has better remedies) that it actually hurts the cause.
Its not an anti-solution, and you provide neither evidence or reasoning to support your claim that it is part of a class of things that backfires.
> Say there's a real problem, the police are killing people
That is a real problem. Education is done in a culturally biased manner which perpetuates the disadvantage or marginalized groups is also a real problem. As is the fact that education is done by outdated methods which underserve even the best served, on top of the inequities. The former one doesn't negate the latter two.
> Like… watering down math classes
This is not about “watering down” math classes, but the opposite; it is about applying evidence to improve the quality and equity of mathematical instructions.
I don't except that my tax dollars should be wasted on broken on biased math just because we haven't fixed racist violence by police.
>This is not about “watering down” math classes, but the opposite; it is about applying evidence to improve the quality and equity of mathematical instructions.
This ignores a majority of students that are are well severed through the current curriculum and would advance more slowly under the proposal.
It was these folks (and it seems you agree) that decided to wrap up a few good suggestions (and a few bad ones) in political propaganda with only the most tenuous tangent to relevance.
People recognize that pretty easily and are instantly turned off. So yes, it backfires, poisoning any hope they had to convince. Re-read this comment section from top to bottom for your evidence.
Completely agree with the polarizing nature of that term and your less inflammatory description. However, I am still unconvinced that lowering the bar or creating a "toy version" of mathematics expressed in different ways is the appropriate solution.
I find it akin to forcing all K-12 students learning computer science to stay on Scratch and block-based programming (which is easily accessible to everyone), simply because the students taking more advanced programming courses who have a software developer for a parent will be unfairly advantaged over the ones who don't. I know people who have had all the resources available and wasted most of them, and others who had few resources available but took every one of them.
At the end of the day, I'd rather have the opportunity to hire a great software developer who has been developing their skills since a young age, rather than someone who was intentionally kept from real-world computer science until college in the name of equity. Similarly, I'd rather see prodigious mathematicians cultivated from a young age - I cannot imagine a situation where the next Ramanujan [1] is created by the California public education system.
By the way, I really appreciate the illuminating alternate description you provided of white supremacy - I hope you don't mind if I start repeating that one :)
But it turns out that if you believe math is everywhere, then creating videos or cartoons to illustrate math concepts is actually kind of reasonable.
For instance, my kid drew a rather detailed human face in the desmos (http://desmos.com) graphing program using line segments, quadratics, cosines, and sines.
Doing this teaches you about what the graphs of these functions look like, and how to translate/scale/rotate the axes to get the curve you want.
It's basically like parametric typography, or SVG.
> Yes, the framing is unnecessarily antagonistic, but if we took the white supremacy dressings off of it I doubt the ideas inside would be divisive at all.
The claims about white supremacy are not merely dressing. The ideological claims are the only interesting part of the document. All the pedagogical stuff you cite approvingly is just the same empty fluff that has dominated US education since the 1960s.
The framing isn't the only divisive part. Some of the ideas are also divisive. Search the PDF for the word 'tracking', one of the most divisive concepts in K12 math education.
"Scrollytelling" is the term you're looking for - The Pudding did a solid walkthrough of a few libraries [1], and I've found scrollama [2] to be a solid bare-bones library. This talk [3] is a few years old, but it's a good one for seeing some different approaches scrollytelling can take.
And since every PDF is its own bespoke nightmare, I'm also trying to build up a collection of awful-to-extract-data-from examples to serve as the foundation for a how-to library[1].
[0] https://jsoma.github.io/natural-pdf/
[1] https://badpdfs.com/