Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…
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Re: Donate Unrestricted
#102The article mentioned the Gates foundation which has terrible records in education initiatives: - The big failure in small schools initiative: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/th... - The big failure in teacher evaluation initiative: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio... - The big failure in Common Core initiative: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/…
>Now it is funding anti-racist math: https://equitablemath.org/ In my limited experience, a lot of students seem to have specific weaknesses with the subjects that are traditionally taught in middle school. Manipulating fractions, applying the distributive property consistently, and simply understanding how to dereference a variable by inserting an equivalent number or expression -- I have multiple students messing t…
It would be nice if someone could extract the good insights and publish them separately, maybe just on one page of paper. For example, here are some ideas that come to my mind:
* For minority students, make sure that the language itself is not a major obstacle. Maybe in a perfect world everyone would get a teacher who speaks their preferred language. But a simple useful thing you can do here and now is to print a dictionary of words you are going to use in the following lecture. Like "triangle = el triángulo", except this is of course a stupid example, but there are probably also good ones. So the student doesn't get stuck merely because you used a word they didn't understand. Depending on how much work you want to spend here, you could even provide a short summary of the lecture. (Review it with someone who speaks the language and understands your subject, don't just use whatever Google Translate throws at you. If you don't know such person, you could probably find someone on Facebook.)
* Do not assume everyone has an access to internet. If it is important, print it on paper and give the paper to kids.
* Check whether your examples are not culturally foreign to the students. Again, a silly made-up example, but don't use "two apples and two apples equals four apples" as an example for kids from a culture that doesn't know apples (or even might have a taboo against apples); just use oranges or whatever. Or just make sure you use a wide enough range of examples.
* Try to get some insight into what their culture expects from your students. Maybe asking questions is considered impolite, or trying to answer a question unless you are 100% sure, or admitting that you know something that your classmates don't know, or admitting that you don't understand something. Try to find a workaround; discuss your solution with people from given culture.
On the other hand... I have downloaded some documents from that website and the language they use is horrible. Bad faith assumed everywhere, there is no such thing as an innocent mistake or ignorance, everything is "racism" and "supremacism". Come on; if you are trying to tell people they should be more empathetic and helpful to each other, the least you can do is stop being an aggressive asshole towards them. Calling someone a racist twenty times in a day, just because they e.g. teach math using the traditional methods, that definitely is not a way to make friends with anyone who has a shred of self-respect. (Yeah, it's not about making friends, it's about signaling being "holier than thou".)
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#103Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#104I worked in Accounting (the dept that did it, not the one that taught it) IT at a major public university for several years. Something like half of the software complexity was in keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on. Whether the source was the federal government, the state, corporate donors, or wealthy individuals, they all had str…
I consider that good news, actually, because it makes restricted donations meaningful.
I always assumed that restricted donations were pointless, because if I donated $x of restricted donations to cause A, the organization would simply take $x of unrestricted donations that it was planning to spend on cause A and instead spend them on other causes. All of my money technically went to cause A, but de facto it didn't.
I still assume that's the case for regular, non-university charities.
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Now it is funding anti-racist math: https://equitablemath.org/ In my limited experience, a lot of students seem to have specific weaknesses with the subjects that are traditionally taught in middle school. Manipulating fractions, applying the distributive property consistently, and simply understanding how to dereference a variable by inserting an equivalent number or expression -- I have multiple students messing t…
https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... I dug in a bit and found that and... as progressive as I would like to think I am, I'm 100% confused as to how "focus on getting the 'right' answer" and "independent practice is valued over teamwork" is... 'white supremacy' showing up in math. HN may not be the place to discuss this, but... am I missing something obvious?
The idea is that those attitudes encourage hypercompetitiveness among children and inappropriately reinforce the idea that math grades are a measure of “inherent ability.”
- “Independent practice is valued over teamwork” encourages a classroom where the “best students” come from families who can afford private tutoring
- “focus on getting the right answer” means that teachers don’t get an appropriate sense of where students are actually struggling, and again incentivizes the affluent privately-tutored student who doesn’t have to worry about explaining their answer.
It is not that either of these are inherently “white supremacist,” but they are inherently poor measures of mathematical understanding. The racism connection comes in by the fact that these are measures which can be “juked” by affluence, and that students from rough backgrounds are unfairly penalized. Given that racism in US teachers is also a big problem, it can lead to ugly situations like “Jimmy is dumb at math and can’t do Algebra II” rather than “Jimmy makes a lot of dumb sign errors and needs specific practice.”
In particular: these are (nominally) race-neutral criticisms of US public education with especially acute impact for black students, but also affect white students from tougher backgrounds.
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#106I worked in Accounting (the dept that did it, not the one that taught it) IT at a major public university for several years. Something like half of the software complexity was in keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on. Whether the source was the federal government, the state, corporate donors, or wealthy individuals, they all had str…
> It was much easier to get money donated for a new building, than to maintain an old one, so you can have a situation in which new buildings are being built while old ones fall apart. That seems logical enough to me. I mean, if every new building is an unprofitable drag on university finances, they wouldn't be building more of them. At the very least a building should pay for its own upkeep, if not its original cons…
No, you then need a steady supply of new buildings to provide funding to fix the old ones/replace the old ones.
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, that happened in the state where I grew up. When they started the state lottery, it was with the promise that the money would be spent on "education." Sure enough, the lottery money went to the education fund, and the contribution from the general fund was reduced by the same amount.
Are you from Texas?
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#108Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#109I would also suggest donating only to non-profits that make everything they do as open/transparent/public domain as possible. In my limited experience there seems to be a correlation between an organization's productivity in solving their existential problem and how open the org is. The more secretive the organization (and the less public domain content it produces) the more likely it spends a significant amount of i…
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#110Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…
But the non-profit is spending the money, and is not earning any money. If you decide to ask for repayment, how could they pay you back?