4 ms·
Yeah I don't really understand the context in which it would be appropriate to have the math problems be left wing political parables. I assume if the vignette
by version_five 4y ago
Yeah I don't really understand the context in which it would be appropriate to have the math problems be left wing political parables.
I assume if the vignette was about defending second amendment rights, or some calculation about number of abortions, it would be equally off-topic from the perspective of the state, but the left wing media would be jumping on how a publisher tried inserting right wing material into their textbook. Just because the NYT agrees with the politics, doesn't make the material ok for use in a math text. It's not about censoring it, it's about not sneaking any kind of politics into a math book.
- t-3 4y agoPolitics are everywere in life. I encountered tons of politics in grade school, from writing prompts to reading assignments, to history class, to the reading comprehension questions on the ACT. What is so special about math? Why are you more bothered about very tame politics than the obvious faults in the question?
- usrn 4y agoI don't remember seeing a single political problem in any of my math books (except maybe some extremely bland ones in statistics.) You can get by without them and they add nothing.
- t-3 4y agoThey do add something: interest and engagement. Relating mathematics to real-life problems helps learners to contextualize and think about math in ways that abstract equations do not.
- orionblastar 4y agoImagine instead of left-wing politics it was right-wing politics. How would you feel then? Statistics and Accounting use math to solve problems as does Computer Science. Just don't be that guy who buys 100 Apples and eats 32 of them, what has he left?
- t-3 4y agoThere was plenty of right wing politics in my schooling... do you not remember singing the national anthem every day? I got suspended for speaking out against the Iraq war. History books glorified genocidal maniacs like Andrew Jackson. A blurb about equal pay would be completely inoffensive in comparison if the question weren't poorly written and perhaps intentionally misleading.
- orionblastar 4y agoBut not in math books that are supposed to be non-political.
- t-3 4y agoWhy should math be any less political? Anyway, I'm quite sure some of the word problems had political interpretations, but I didn't do any homework at all for the entirety of high school (and very little earlier) and didn't read my math textbooks either. "Politics" is a very weak excuse for banning these books, when the poorly written problems are of much greater concern!