Math teacher was trained on equity, culture, but not how to teach math
- Joanne Jacobs
- Sep 29
- 3 min read
Teacher training at a well-respected university focused on social justice, cultural relevance, students' psychology -- but not how to teach math, an engineer turned math teacher tells Holly Korbey in an interview. "Yellow Heights," as he calls himself, is the author of Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Math Teacher.
Yellow Heights was a top math student in China, he tells Korbey. In the U.S., he enjoying working with students in his son's school math club. After working for Microsoft and then in finance, his startup failed. He enrolled in a one-year master's in teaching program to prepare for a new career.
Classes focused on justice and equity, supporting adolescent students in their identities, "culturally sustaining pedagogy" and building healthy relationships with students, he tells Korbey. There were classes on the practical part of teaching, but they also focused on culture.
“Teaching for Learning” was "pretty ideological. It’s about cultural background, adolescent development, a little focus on students with disability and how to deal with that," says Yellow Heights.
“Content Area Methods” wasn't about math content. "It’s basically about respecting different identities, working in different school environments — very culturally focused."
The adolescent development course had one chapter on psychology, he says. There was little discussion. The class went on "six chapters dedicated to social issues."
He estimates that 10 percent to 15 percent of coursework was about math or teaching. It was "a total waste of money, a waste of time."
Many of his classmates -- especially the recent college graduates -- didn't know much math, Yellow Heights adds. Some said they were "scared of math."
As a student teacher, he had a great mentor. "But every class was about how to infuse equity in everything you do." Nothing was based on evidence about what works.
In every class, you must include elements to show that math is multicultural. . . . some math came from Mexican heritage, some from the Middle East. And I did dig into Chinese math heritage. You must . . . show that math was invented by cultures other than Europe.
When he started teaching, he was surprised to hear colleagues say they raised the grades of students from "challenged families." Students had lost ground in remote classes. Standards were lowered, so most could get A's.
"Isn’t the equitable thing to do to teach students how to do math?," asks Korbey.
It's not what he was taught in graduate school, says Yellow Heights.
In China and other Asian systems, "math is like gymnastics of your mind, and for that you need muscle practice," he says. "But if you want to use it creatively, with too much practice you can also lose a sense of wonder and lose a sense of discovery." So he tries to combine practice and discovery. Of course, he adds, "if a student learns math to that degree, they can use it anywhere. Just having your brain without any muscle, your thinking is going to be empty."
Future elementary teachers need high-quality, evidence-based training in teaching math to young children, write Gena Nelson and Cece Zhou of Deans for Impact. "Just as the science of reading has sparked system-wide shifts in how literacy is taught, the science of how early math must be taught deserves the same attention and action."
Most teacher-preparation programs devote little time to key math concepts, reports the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) report.
Read "Chaos in the Classroom" and "The Great Classroom Collapse" and other books by Lance Izumi. He describes the situation well, mostly focused on reading and discipline.
Critics of the K-12 credential industry and of Colleges of Education said all this fifty years ago. That, in itself, demonstrates the State-monopoly credential industry's resistance to change.
In abstract, the education industry, with its wildly diverse inputs (individual children's interests and abilities) and outputs (the possible career paths that a modern industrial democracy offers) is a highly unlikely candidate for rule-bound, necessarily bureaucratic State (i.e., government, generally) operation.
College of Education courses on the transcript add nothing to teacher performance. This has been known for decades. Search "Holmes Group". Search "Staiger, Gordon, and Kane, 'Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance On the Job' ". Search "Holland, 'How to Build a Better Teacher', Policy Review_".
60+ years ago, when I was in college, the Ed School.was viewed as a joke. The placement office had a bulletin board showing GPA vs Quartiles. In the Ed School, under a 3.4 put you in the bottom quartile. In contrast, an engineering student with a 2.9 was in the top quartile. Since then, your car almost drives itself and gets fuel milage numbers 2 to 3 times '60s cars. The device in your pocket can tell you the historical GDP of Tibet, and connect you to someone in Australia in seconds. Satellite weather forecasting has saved millions of lives. And... Johnny still can't read.
Make teacher's unions (by whatever label ) illegal. Dissolve the Ed Schools. Move elementary e…
This is so true. In my career in higher ed, I saw that most of the teaching in MS or Ph.D. programs was pedagogy, not teaching methods. How else can they fill all up those units to create a degree? And the K-12 schools are feeding this by requiring advanced degrees to get promotions or raises. It should be based on teaching ability.
Twenty-five years ago only one course was on content in Ed School, and it was of little value. I think some Ed Schools like CSU Fullerton take "How to Teach" seriously. Ed School is for the credential. Many, if not most, students ignore the propaganda as much as possible: just repeat that Paulo Freire was a genius.