Western teachings are linear, singular, and static, we lack change and we only are taught one way. Back when I was being taught math if a classmate found a different way to do multiplication or division they would be shut down because it was not done a certain way that was only "correct". When teachers shut down other ways of performing it is an example of oppressing their students and teaching to conform. Therefore, outside methods were never praised. Then again my elementary class through out the years only had two students who were Taiwanese and Chinese, I never was aware of the challenges they could have faced.
After reading Poirier's article about Inuit Mathematics I did notice some differences from how I have been taught through a westernized curriculum. Inuit children were very good with spacial representations and relations while children who lived in Montreal, as they used for an example, were not. An example Poirier gave was he learned that the Inuit know how far they are away from the bay by how potent the smell of salt is in the air. The guest speaker touched base on how Indigenous people could tell if an arrow was missing from a set of let's say 24 since Indigenous people's education was all oral and visual rather than written on paper. That I found was a distinct difference in teaching math. Most of us were taught solely on paper where mental images of adding 8 + 9 was difficult and hard to know what that looks like. Another difference was how they explained shapes and numbers, emphasis on explain. Inuit culture chose words to explain visually what the object looks like and that is how they differentiate each shape. For example, Triangle is Makkaujaq where "ujaq" means looks like and "makk" means top of hood. I thought that is such a clever way and simpler way of understanding what a triangle is. When I was taught shapes in school our explanation was a math explanation; tri = 3. Here we are explaining math with math (or numbers) but Inuit people explain math with visuals. I can picture a hat like a witch and that is the shape of a triangle. Another example I found interesting was how they number. 2 is Marruuk and 20 is Avatit so 40 is Avatit Marruuk; twenty two times. Clever. So another distinct difference is how they explain numbers and shapes.
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love what you wrote here! I really liked that you touched on how their lessons are very oral instead of written, and I also really liked that you included bits of the Inuit language when providing examples