Texas’s state school board has rejected Everyday Math texts, writes Michelle Malkin in a column excoriating “fuzzy math.”
Citing “an Illinois mom,” Malking says the fifth-grade Everyday Math textbook asks:
A. If math were a color, it would be –, because –.
B. If it were a food, it would be –, because –.
C. If it were weather, it would be –, because –.
I’m thinking white cotton candy in a heavy rainstorm.
That “what color is math” is eerily reminiscent of the Simpsons episode where they made a special “girl-friendly” school and Lisa was utterly dismayed to find that “math” had become “How does the number 3 make you FEEL.”
(I realize it’s probably not as bad as Malkin and the Illinois Mom are making it out to be, but one of the things I LOVED about math as a kid was that it was cut-and-dried. There was one right answer to the questions, there was a specific procedure to be followed, it was logical.)
I wonder how many fifth-graders answer “If math were a color, it would be brown, because it’s poop”. Quite a few is my guess.
Just before recess I asked my fifth graders this question. Here are a few answers:
Pink - because it “sucks” and is remedial
Blue - “Math just has a blue feeling”
Green - “That’s the color of our math book”
and my favorite from one of my lower students:
Black - Because “you need to see it clearly to solve the problems, the problems need to be written in black, if it is another color you might not be able to read it correctly”
Go figure.
It sounds like Everyday Math is trying to bring back the sixties by encouraging psychadelic drug use among our children!
“Dude… I can see the Math… and it’s green….”
Let the kids balance the teacher’s checkbook - the color then might be red.
The point of math is that it is correct no matter what the unit of measurement (red objects, foodstuffs, degrees Fahrenheit, etc.), so the correct answer is to un-ask the question: math has no color, no taste, is unaffected by the tides, etc.
Or are they testing the kids for synesthesia?
Is this real? I cannot believe we would dumb down math. Hasn’t history taught us that we need to be able to do more math. We need it to balance our check books, manage our budget etc. I mean come on the government cant even manage the budget. Doesnt that say it all?
“Hasn’t history taught us…”
What history?
“Is this real? I cannot believe we would dumb down math.”
It appears to be real. Illinois Loop hosts a copy of a Wall Street Journal editorial from 2000 that claims just this:
http://illinoisloop.org/wsj_mathwars.html
I can’t verify that the purported WSJ editorial is an actual WSJ editorial, nor can I confirm that the editorial is correct (I don’t have the Everyday Math 5th grade teachers bood). But I believe that it is real.
I leave open the possibility that these excerpts make more sense when taken in context … but I’m not very optimistic.
-Mark Roulo
It is truly a pity that the authors of such nonsense are not given what they so obviously need, which is inpatient psychiatric treatment. Anybody who believes that such drivel teaches mathemetics is insane.
Perhaps that is where the UN “Climatologists” learned their math.
In the same vein, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
She beats me every time.
Amber,
“I mean come on the government cant even manage the budget.”
Uhh, I yield to no one in thinking this math-color thing is a bad idea, but surely you don’t really think the problem of managing the budget is because we can’t count, do you?
OK, I guess it’s my turn to be the crotchety old guy.
The name “Fuzzy Math” for this non-math was invented by extension of the names Fuzzy Logic and Fuzzy Set Theory, both respectable if controversial techniques for approaching ambiguity in logic. Wikipedia has adequate writeups on all three items.
[long rant about inappropriate appropriation of terms from quantum mechanics DELETED by author]