• Part 1: At the beginning of the reading, Leroy Little Bear (2000) states that colonialism “tries to maintain a singular social order by means of force and law, suppressing the diversity of human worldviews. … Typically, this proposition creates oppression and discrimination” (p. 77). Think back on your experiences of the teaching and learning of mathematics — were there aspects of it that were oppressive and/or discriminating for you or other students?
• Part 2: After reading Poirier’s article: Teaching mathematics and the Inuit Community, identify at least three ways in which Inuit mathematics challenge Eurocentric ideas about the purposes of mathematics and the way we learn it.

I haven’t had the experience of teaching mathematics, so I will focus on my own experiences for this response. Math class was always quite easy for me; I was able to catch on to new topics easily, and didn’t have to study much for quizzes. I don’t know if this is due to having good teachers, or due to being able to visualize problems and apply formulas due to some self-understood ability. However, my sister did not have a similar experience. She struggled to remain organized in her calculations and struggled to apply the correct formulas to problems, and to find her way to an answer. I never realized how privileged I was to experience ease in math class until I went to university. I hadn’t been in school for a few years, and when I went to try math 110, I ended up dropping out because I couldn’t understand the class and it didn’t come naturally. I struggled to understand what the prof was teaching us, and felt really put off because it was so structured. Having this difficult experience in university math showed me how many other students must have felt in elementary and high school. Not being able to come up with an answer quickly must have felt very discouraging to others, especially when seeing other students such as myself finish an entire test in half of the time it took them. Certain teachers would also not accept different ways of arriving at an answer other than what they had taught, which doesn’t really make sense to me as long as a student is showing their work. 

The second article was eye opening in that it showed a different way to consider mathematics. Our entire semester has worked around challenging curriculum, and many of my classmates and I have said, “I don’t know how we can possibly change math, or “Indigenize” math, it’s just math and that’s the way it is.” Working from a base twenty system (derived from using ten fingers and ten toes together in their igloos) allows the Inuit to think about math in a very different way than we do here. They also develop better spatial and strategic thinking skills than many of us do here as well, because that is better suited to their everyday. For example, they can ‘read’ a snowbank or smell the air to assess distance. Further, their way of learning and teaching is through oral instruction and application, rather than focusing on paper like ours. After reading the article, one could say that Inuit children learn math in a way that has much more application to their everyday lives. After all, how many times have you heard someone who learned math in a Eurocentric way say, “when am I ever going to use this, and why am I learning it?”