There’s Always a Tyrone
Last week my calculus class got up to optimization problems and they made a starling realization: the word problems in the calculus book had no names. Perhaps a farmer needs to fence off a rectangular area or a driver needs to find the shortest path between point A in a field and point B on a road, but those professionals are always anonymous and their only personality is that they had a problem to solve. My class (ranging from sophomores to seniors) was quite happy. This was a right of passage for them; they don’t need to be babied and told that they need to foster a fake connection with a throwaway character anymore. Besides, they never really liked the names anyway.
Then they moved on to how textbooks often forced diversity in the math classroom by inserting “ethnic” names into word problems. As one of my students put it, there always a Tyrone somewhere in a textbook.
The latest, 2010 edition texts—they’re from the future, you see—that I’m using for my lower level classes do in fact follow this method in every problem. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Once, a native rural-Vermonter who has never seen the name “Raul” in all fourteen years of life was shocked that such a name existed and asked me to pronounce it. Not having said that name in almost a decade myself—thanks to my migration to rural Western/Northern New England—and not being able to pronounce the “r” so close to the “l”—my colleague said that Raul is “one of the worst names for Asian tongues, just like mine, so I understand”—I managed to completely butcher it on the first go. Good thing the kids were just having too much fun trying to say “Raul” for themselves to notice.
Also, since one lesson we want to emphasis in introductory algebra is that we always want to give things names it does make sense to name our characters.
Here’s where it gets tricky: Sheniqua and Chen would both attempt a problem and you’ll have to figure out who did it wrong; the kids probably are too busy doing the problem to notice that I’m sweating and muttering “please don’t let Sheniqua be the wrong one that would be so racist and sexist at the same time”. I understand that if Ricardo is buying an MP3 player and needs to figure out what the discount is the students may identify with the problem better and maybe subconsciously think “okay Hispanic folks buy MP3 players too”, but when it comes to the “whose solution is better” type problems do we really need to call them more than Student A and Student B? Perhaps in this fictional universe within this algebra text African-American girls do better than white and Asian-American boys all the time, but then—you know what, why does the book even allow me to ask this question in the first place?
The biggest issue I have with our text is that only three out of so many pictures in the book contain interactions between folks with different shades of skin color. They are: a black woman beating a white woman in a (running) race, an Asian doctor attending a Hispanic woman and two pre-teen girls (one white and one black) texting on their pink cell phones. God forbid that the prom queen and king came from different cultural backgrounds or that people of different skin colors sit in the same log-cart in the waterpark
Look, I’m not really asking for much here. It’s not like I want an openly gay couple measuring their living room or a transitioning transgendered woman trying to calculate how wide her hips expanded or an imam, a rabbi, a priest and the local Atheist leader trying to figure out how much lemonade to serve in the community interfaith picnic. I’ll ask for those things in a few decades. Right now, I just want to see more pictures of a black dude and a white dude and maybe some other boys and girls of maybe different colors hanging out in a social setting—you know, like my students do? It doesn’t even have to be romantic; I understand that our nation is not 100% comfortable with that yet so I won’t push you on that. You do have to sell books to Louisiana.
On the bright side, at least pre-teen girls break the racial barriers that the rest of America(n textbook) holds so tightly; I only hope that they not only agree on Tyrone being the cutest boy in the class but that it’s okay for either one of them to date him but he won’t really pay them any attention anyway because he seems to always be in a math problem or something. Sigh.
I was thinking that you could solve this problem by putting in elves and orcs and things, maybe Vulcans and Romulans, and then no one would be offended. Then I realized that all elves and dwarves are white and all orcs and goblins have dark skin; likewise, Vulcans are almost all white (there was that one black one on VOYAGER), Klingons are all brown. So much for Tolkien and Roddenberry.
What about furry woodland creatures? Or robots with alphanumeric codes for designators? Or names from Calvino (Qfwfq) or Lem (Trurl, Klapaucius) or Adams (Zaphod)…
I know you’re sick of hearing about our textbooks, but our textbooks always had carefully gender-neutral names in them. Ie. Chris, Alex, etc.. Then again I suppose those are all Western names.