Oct. 15, 2000

THE PERILS OF MAKING MATH SERVE MULTICULTURAL GOALS

Are you worried that your children may not learn math and science because their teachers were never trained to teach those subjects? Perhaps you should worry also about what prospective teachers have been told if they are trained.

Like the importance of ''ethnomathematics.''

The International Study Group on Ethnomathematics says, ''the term was coined by Ubiratan D'Ambrosio to describe the mathematical practices of identifiable cultural groups.''

Commonly that refers to ethnic groups, especially isolated indigenous societies, but it can refer to any group -- ''labor communitites, religious tradiations, professional classes and so on.''

You could interpret that as meaning that the entire edifice of modern mathematics is the ''ethnomathematics'' of the members of the American Mathematical Society and other professional organizations, but somehow I suspect that's not what they mean.

As applied to education, ethnomathematics is the theory that children cannot learn math unless it is presented to them in a culturally relevant way.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, which recently ran a story about ISGEm, illustrates this with a familiar puzzle reworked to be more culturally relevant.

A man in North Africa must cross a river with a jackal, a goat and a bunch of fig leaves. He has a boat that can hold him and two of the three items at once. Neither the jackal and the goat nor the goat and the fig leaves can be left alone together. How can the man get all three items across the river?

This is the sort of thing the Car Guys pose as their puzzler of the week. Nobody expects it to be realistic. Other versions refer to wolves and sheep, or cannibals and missionaries.

It is both silly and insulting to assume there are children of any ancestry who can solve such problems easily if they are familiar with the animals used, but will be flummoxed by unfamiliar ones.

We might also wonder just what ethnic group the professor has in mind (he teaches at the Newark, N.J., campus of Rutgers University). The only place an American child will have encountered a jackal is in the zoo, and there, it wouldn't have been chasing goats. If the child has seen a goat, it was probably in a herd brought in to eat thistles in a city park.

And what is a poor teacher to do when her class includes children from everywhere under the sun? Distribute a whole ark full of river-crossing puzzles?

Like most educational fads, this one is rooted in the best of intentions. Eduardo Jesus Arismendi-Pardi, who teaches at Orange Coast College in California, says highlighting the contributions of women and minority groups makes the subject more appealing to them.

''They feel good about the fact that they see themselves in the subject,'' he told the Chronicle. ''Their eyes light up.''

You know, I was a mathematician once upon a time, and I wasn't impressed by efforts to make the subject more appealing to me by pretending women were more important in the history of mathematics than they were. To me it merely emphasized the disparity.

Ron Eglash of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute runs the group's Web page, rensselaer.edu/(tilde)eglash/isgem.htm. Though Eglash is clearly a supporter of the value of studying mathematics within other cultures, he's critical of the way it is sometimes done.

''What goes under the name of multicultural mathematics is too often a cheap shortcut that merely replaces Dick and Jane counting marbles with Tatuk and Esteban counting coconuts,'' he writes.

Using a variety of examples to teach mathematical concepts is good classroom practice, and if the examples make students feel good about themselves and if that helps them learn more, so much the better -- though those are two big ifs.

It's very misleading, however, to imply that doing mathematics is the same as carrying out other activities that illustrate mathematical principles. After all, the reproduction of rabbits is described by the Fibonacci series, but we don't call what the rabbits are doing mathematics.

Similarly, Ute beadwork may illustrate principles of group theory -- an example from the group's newsletter -- but you can't learn group theory by stringing beads.

Not even if it make's someone's eyes light up.

(701 words)