Conservatives, Progressives, and the in-between.

While I was reading the post, almost every paragraph made me relate to the progressives and solidify my stance towards them. I do understand that not everything the opposition stands for is absurd and outdated, but I just couldn’t bear them. And my first moment that I had to take a quick brain brake was when the author mentioned that this dichotomous view of the approaches is not necessarily constructive. It is true, and the ideas do have to be discussed more in a sense of “what are the consequences of our actions” than a “I’m right and you are wrong”. There is value and use on both the progressive view and (admitting almost against my will) the conservative view. I kept reading and, although I reluctantly accepted that the conservatives weren’t that terrible, I had a hard time accepting any of their views.

Then when I got to the table again to reread it and it all made sense. It wasn’t exactly the content of the table, it was more the subjective message being passed. Just the descriptors of the conservatives makes me disagree with them. For example, the use of descriptor like “obedience” could have almost the same meaning if we used “discipline”, but it’s way harder for someone to resonate with “obedience” than it is with “discipline”. There is even a more flourished way to say basically the same thing: “adherence to established mathematical conventions”. On the other side we have descriptors like “exploratory”, which could be written in a way less flattering way as “students are expected to construct methods that may be inefficient or erroneous”. That just showed me the power of communication.