Synthesis of DiME report

Confession time: I found the DiMe chapter really good but really dense!

So I thought I'd create a wordle of the report to see which key words or ideas dominated.  I expected to see identity, culture, equity, race etc.  Instead, I got this:

http://wordle.net

So within the DiME article, there are more references to students and mathematics than any other words.  The fact that these two words are the same size indicates that they were mentioned the same amount of times in the report.

While this was not what I expected, it got me thinking.  Prior to this class and all the readings, I would have said that math class was all about math.  Math remains math, regardless of who was learning it.  But this wordle suggests something else:  mathematics cannot rooted in it's rules and algorithms.  It needs to respond to the students learning it.  Who students are and what they bring into the mathematics classroom is equally important as mathematics itself.