I too am very much like the author. I have always done well on tests, but never had much patience for tedious school work. And yes, I have felt the same disresp

I too am very much like the author. I have always done well on tests, but never had much patience for tedious school work. And yes, I have felt the same disrespect for me that the author has felt. But the author completely missed the point of silly word problems in math homework. They aren't silly because educators are disconnected with the real world, and they aren't disrespecting you either. They are silly precisely to convey the point that the words do not matter...much in the same way that the name of an algebraic variable does not matter. The Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem, the Chinese Postman problem, and the Traveling Salesman problem are all silly word problems with a seeming disconnect from reality. And yet huge and seemingly insurmountable problems can be solved using them by employing a technique that is often called Projection: You take a problem you know but can't solve and project it onto a similar problem you know and can solve. Using this technique, not only could you take an NP-Complete production scheduling problem and project it into a basic integer linear program that can be solved trivially using the simplex algorithm with cutting planes and column generation...but you could also develop the simplex algorithm itself, just as Dantzig did. Math teachers that formulate their homework problems in terms that are immediately applicable to the real world may be more successful in getting people interested in mathematics, but if they reduce their homework problems to just those that are "real world" enough to be interesting to wandering minds, they risk destroying the creativity to solve real world problems that are actually hard. That would be a much bigger disrespect to the student than anything the author has ever experienced.