I was away with my family at the weekend. My grandson is 9-years-old. He has been watching the news and suddenly asked the rom in general, “If they have invaded Ukraine will it be us next?” Our daughter-in-law immediately got onto her phone and showed him where Ukraine was on a world map. He has a reasonable sense of the world map and so this meant that he understood Ukraine is, ”a long way away.” We talked about the distances involved, both in terms of travel times and absolute distances. So, Kyiv is 1698 miles away and takes 1 day 5 hours to drive (if we don’t sleep!). We also worked out how long this would take to walk. This would be 113 days if we walk for 15 miles a day; which is quite a distance to walk each day. That means that someone leaving today would not arrive until the 29th June. So, we used mathematics both to reassure, perhaps, that any personal threat wasn’t imminent and to find a way of empathising with the horrendous choices which individuals are having to make. Perhaps m, more importantly, we said to our Grandson, “It is okay to be worried about these things and to want to talk about them.” And, “Sometimes mathematics is completely tied up to the way that we think about and interpret the world.”
At the same time, I was processing a debate that has been taking place on a global mathematics education email list that I am a member of. One colleague in the group, a German national, had posted a petition from Germany asking that Russia be removed from the SWIFT banking system. This had provoked an angry response from many on the list who wondered why this conflict was being seen in a different way from the many other conflicts around the world that had directly impacted on them. This included the conflicts in Palestine, Syria, Iran and Iraq, as well as in many Latin American countries. Friends and colleagues caught up in these conflicts saw ‘The West’ as the aggressor.
It seems to me that I need to do some mathematics (and history and geography) here as there is plenty of data available of the impact and prevalence of war around the world which can challenge the Western-Centric view that we are hearing in the UK that this is the greatest threat to peace since 1945. This is not meant in any way to diminish what is happening, particularly at an individual level, in Ukraine, but to acknowledge that war constantly has an impact on all humanity, wherever in the world people happen to live.
There is a weekly radio broadcast in the UK called, More or less. This programme answers key questions of the day using mathematics, usually drawing on statistics and data-handling. In the most recent programme a research fellow for defence and analysis from aUK University was asked about the accuracy of the figures that are offered by opposing administrations. The researcher suggested that the figure of 150 000 Russian troops on the border of Ukraine before the invasion was probably accurate. This figure could be confirmed using satellite imagery and reports on social media. This figure is about 5-fold the number of troops that might be expected. It is also bigger than the size of the armies sent to Afghanistan or Iraq. It is the largest army that Russia might be expected to muster and “matches” the Ukrainian army. The researcher was asked, “Is this size of army big enough?” They replied that although there is no specific metric it is estimated that an attacking army might lose 5 soldiers in attacking a city for every defending soldier. It is frightening to see this sort of metric being used to calculate the ‘value’ of a human life. A colleague posted a poem by Michael Rosen which makes this point. I think it is worth including this in full:
When they do war, they forget how to count
When they do war
They forget how to count
They forget how to count
And that’s how they do it.
They come
They kill
They kill
They go
They give us
No numbers
No names
They disappear them
They vanish them
It’s how they do it.
They come
They kill
They kill
They go
Names are deleted
Numbers are un-counted
bodies are un-included
Faces are un-remembered
That’s how they do it.
They come in
They flush out
They mop up
They take out
No numbers
No names
No names
No numbers
And it’s worth it,
they say.
It’s worth it.
Believe us, it’s worth it
believe us.
Oh yes it IS worth it
if you forget how to count.
It IS worth it
if you forget the numbers.
It IS worth it
if you forget the names.
It IS worth it
if you forget the faces.
That’s how they do it.
But
we’re counting.
Watch us:
we’re counting.
Listen:
we’re counting.
And-
-we count.
This is available at
http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2015/11/when-they-do-war-they-forget-how-to.html
and, perhaps, this takes us to what we can do, as mathematics educators. To what should be the driving force of all that we do as teachers. To what should be the driving aim of all National Curricula. “Making our children more human”. The letter below was written by a survivor of the Holocaust and was first shared by Haim Ginott:
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates.
So, I am suspicious of education.
My request is this: Help your children become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.
So, what am I trying to say? I think I am stumbling toward saying, I will aim to teach as if in a time of war everyday. After all, unfortunately we are always in a time of war somewhere in the world and, to paraphrase an ex English prime minster, if we are not a citizen of the world we are not a citizen of anywhere. And, if I am teaching ‘as if in a time of war’, my focus is to work with my learners towards becoming more humane through the mathematics we share.
Tony Cotton is editor of Mathematics Teaching. The journal of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (ATM). For more information on the ATM go to www.atm.org.uk. The views in this blog are Tony’s own.
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