Review of "Radical Equations"

I choose this book because of my interest in the Civil Rights movement, and it did not disappoint. Robert "Bob" Moses can truly claim to have walked the walk, as he played a crucial role in organizing the suffrage movement in Mississippi. Considering the beatings, arrests, and threats he received along the way, it's remarkable enough that the man is around to tell his story. What's more amazing still is that in his own lifetime, he's seen his "extreme" position of equal rights become the only respectable one, and seen himself become an elder statesman of the movement. (Truly, the still-continuing march from slavery towards equality must be the most inspiring story American history has to offer; maybe even world history.)

Now, however, Dr. Moses has shifted his campaign for equality to a different venue indeed. Just as a vote is the gateway to democratic citizenship and equality with one's political peers, Moses views mathematical literacy as the gateway to "economic citizenship" for today's black Americans. Mastery of algebra is an essential gateway to college, increasingly seen as the only path to a middle-class lifestyle.

Throughout, Dr. Moses draws parallels with the travails of the Civil Rights movement. What Moses is trying to effect in the schools where he mentors is nothing less than a culture change. He invites the reader to ask, "How can we change a community's way of thinking about things; make it reconsider what is collectively possible; and how do we motivate people to go ahead and take action?" It sometimes seems that every struggle Bob Moses ever fought, from Mississippi to middle schools, is about shifting the Overton window of possible outcomes. It's striking how much energy it took to mobilize blacks themselves to take ownership of their birthright as American citizens to cast a ballot. Too many lived in a state of resignation to their station. Moses wants the middle school students to rise up and demand what is theirs as well—in a sense. He unabashedly uses the language of the '60s with the students: competency in school, and especially math, is a right. When he first introduces the Algebra Project to a new school, Moses tries to juice enthusiasm by talking about the program as a privilege.

To win converts to this view, Moses first sees the need to rototill over the students' already packed-down impressions of math. As the first lesson of every Algebra Project classroom, he organizes an extravaganza: a field trip outside into the city (on public transportation if possible), which at first seems to have implausibly little to do with math. This trip (which many school administrators met with skepticism—more on that later) serves two functions. First, it marks a violent break with whatever prior experience students have had with the subject. When riding the T is math class, you know math is not going to be the same as before. Second, Moses uses the idea of motion towards or from a physical goal as the most natural and relevant jumping-off point for middle schoolers to understand the basic concepts of algebra. As a teacher, Moses is able to mine weeks worth of curricula from that single experience: from operations with negative numbers, to distance over time, to rates of change (and therefore the all-important idea of slope).

It's actually something of a pity that Moses doesn't venture more into the nuts and bolts of how he teaches. His overall method is pretty clear, and there are a few representative stories about students learning, but I would have loved just a single chapter that narrated on a minute-by-minute basis how he runs his class. Oh well, I suppose pre-service teachers can't have been expected to be the target audience.

What Moses does spend quite a bit of time on is the organizational side; how to win over dubious teachers, how to mobilize parents, how to build consensus. One gets the sense that for all the love of what he does in the classroom, Dr. Moses is still a community organizer at heart. Since his algebra agenda is a totalizing project and essentially mutually exclusive with the traditional curriculum, there was no doubt it would have its doubters. In a way, you might say the amount of resistance he faces is surprisingly low.  The biggest stumbling blocks have been teachers (often the minority on a team whose majority voted to adopt the Project) who feel uncomfortable with Moses's self-discovery model of education, and administrators who fear the program could hinder the schools' test scores, or raise difficulties when paperwork time comes and state standards must be met.

Parents, on the other hand, seem to have been Dr. Moses's eagerest allies. It seems that for all those parents who do not understand or even fear algebra, they decidedly want their own children to learn it if given a choice. Above all, Moses sells parents on the idea that mathematical literacy is the pathway from poverty to independence. Moses relates the story of one New York City school where he rallied dozens of students and teachers to demand a more advanced math be offered, only to realize that he had been so successful that the school could not offer nearly enough sections of the class to meet demand.

Such popularizing is well within Moses's broader goals. He refers to mathematics as it was once practiced as a "high priesthood" that could select with care only those with unusual talent and interest. Today, he feels, mathematics must be democratized. Why, he asks, do parents feel they can volunteer with reasonable confidence to look over their child's essay, but confess inability—sometimes proud inability—when it comes to junior's math homework?

In all, this was an easy read on an important topic by a man whose words command respect. I would enthusiastically recommend Dr. Moses's book.