GOP’s Education Initiative
We’ve now reached the portion of the Culture Wars wherein the states are doing the book banning, or Welcome to Floriduh:
In its latest attempt to be the nation’s leader in restricting what happens in public school classrooms, Florida said it has rejected a pile of math textbooks submitted by publishers in part because they “contained prohibited subjects,” including critical race theory.
The Florida Department of Education announced on Friday that Richard Corcoran, the outgoing commissioner of education, approved an initial adoption list of instructional materials for math, but 41 percent of the submitted textbooks were rejected — most of them in elementary school…
…Although the department described the textbook review process as “transparent,” it did not mention which textbooks had been rejected or cite examples from the offending passages.
Now of course there is not a list of those banned books or examples of Critical Race Theory contained therein.
As one wag on Twitter put it:
UPDATE 1: it’s not just me
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Mock Paper Scissors 
How dare they put those BLACK numbers on top of that pristine WHITE page!!1!1!!
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Their statment keeps mentioning the old bugaboo “Common Core” That evil communist democrat gay anti-American concept that :
“Math is Math, and if we want to bring up our abysmal math test scores, maybe we should have a better national standard for Math curricula”
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They can’t cite examples of CRT secretly injected into the maths, that would be like releasing the liberal brain poison into the air!
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I did see one example, although I never saw where DeSantis agreed with it.
It was allegedly a math worksheet or homework that combined some math questions (what values of x and y work for both of these equations) with some of Maya Angelou’s origin story, so if you pick the correct math answer you get Maya details with it.
Struck me as a really stupid way to present math, but what do I know?
Anyway, this single example is what they apparently have, and it isn’t CRT anyway, although the twit that posted it claimed it was.
So they got nothing except what they scouted up from, probably, a Black History Month attempt to make math fun and relevant.
I have it on authority, if your students can’t do math you won’t convince them they can by trying to make it “fun” or “relevant”. My sis had a book laying around that I read years ago, so I don’t remember the author, but he had a “troubled” classroom assigned to him and his assistant. They caught the kids in their neighborhood doing things like calculating bowling scores or arguing, correctly, with cashiers about how much change they were due. When the math problems were then couched in these terms they had the exact same lack of ability to answer correctly, including stuff like “I don’t get it”, “It’s too hard”. It’s math. It’s only sexy to people who like or, at least, accept math.
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Might the author have been James Herndon and the book titled “How To Survive in Your Native Land”?
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That exercise that’s going around is not from a math textbook, but is from some website. It’s been falsely claimed that it’s in textbooks but it isn’t.
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Exactly, found online. Thought I mentioned that. Oops.
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Also, it is the only example I’ve seen. Could be the only example they have. I would be totally not surprised at that.
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Come on Karma. Do your thing.
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Although my first guess is that DeSantis has a family member, a friend or a business partner who publishes crappy math textbooks and the only way they can sell them is if all the good textbooks are banned.
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I’m sure one of his donors is in on the scam, too. Also.
Rgds,
TG
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Per noted mathematician Randy Marsh: [(length x diameter) + (Weight / Girth)] / Angle of Tip 2.
If that doesn’t shame white Floridians, I don’t know what does.
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😀😀😀
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Dem math books must tell da colored folk how to figure out how many beans is in da jar, or bubbles in dat soap bar.
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