Algebra as a liberal agenda tool

Gee, why pick wealth as the subject of an exercise in distribution? Over at about.com, they managed seven different worksheets without mentioning money once. The distributive property is a mathematical term, not a financial one. I'd like to see the worksheet to see how the concept was used financially.

“Distribute the wealth!” Bolling exclaimed, reading the worksheet. “Distribute the wealth with the lovely rich girl with a big ole bag of money, handing some money out.”

Click to expand...

Why not a farmer handing out produce to his neighbors, or some such example?

Whether the author anticipated the furor over wealth redistribution and relished it or was simply tone-deaf to it, they made a bad choice.

Not to mention that the author suffers from the common misconception that possession of money equates with wealth.

Don said:

Gee, why pick wealth as the subject of an exercise in distribution? Over at about.com, they managed seven different worksheets without mentioning money once. The distributive property is a mathematical term, not a financial one. I'd like to see the worksheet to see how the concept was used financially.

Why not a farmer handing out produce to his neighbors, or some such example?

Whether the author anticipated the furor over wealth redistribution and relished it or was simply tone-deaf to it, they made a bad choice.

Not to mention that the author suffers from the common misconception that possession of money equates with wealth.

Click to expand...

Or maybe that was the point. Wealth is even more abstract than money or vegetables and the wealth of course multiplies (at least algebraically) once it arrives
at its distribution point.

Wealth actually seems like a reasonable abstraction to use.

Fertilizer, which might seem better at first glance, implies some kind of time factor rather than some arbitrary expansions at different conceptual locations.

There are important things to get excited about in education today, and there are silly things. This is one of the silly things.

Money is often used to illustrate math principles. For instance, my wife taught 1st grade and one of the perennial story problems went something like this: "If Sarah* had ten pennies and gave 5 of them to Jerry*, how many pennies would she have left?"

I think there are agendas (both from the Right and the Left) with regards to education and textbooks, but this isn't one of them.

(*Or it could be Maria and Ismael)

Roger J Carlson said:

There are important things to get excited about in education today, and there are silly things. This is one of the silly things.

Money is often used to illustrate math principles. For instance, my wife taught 1st grade and one of the perennial story problems went something like this: "If Sarah* had ten pennies and gave 5 of them to Jerry*, how many pennies would she have left?"

I think there are agendas (both from the Right and the Left) with regards to education and textbooks, but this isn't one of them.

(*Or it could be Maria and Ismael)

Click to expand...

I'm with Roger on this one, down to the worksheets. My second grader brought home worksheets that used money to teach math from kindergarten on. Story problems using them, too, yep.

Liberal agenda. Bah. Seems like a huge stretch, to me. Starting at bogeymen of their own creation.

One of the ways to connect with students is to connect the concepts to their experience. Again, money is a good way to do that. I often use currency conversion to introduce the concept of converting between different units of measurement in my chemistry classes because it shows them that they already know how to do that kind of problem.

Don said:

Gee, why pick wealth as the subject of an exercise in distribution? Over at about.com, they managed seven different worksheets without mentioning money once. The distributive property is a mathematical term, not a financial one. I'd like to see the worksheet to see how the concept was used financially.

Why not a farmer handing out produce to his neighbors, or some such example?

Whether the author anticipated the furor over wealth redistribution and relished it or was simply tone-deaf to it, they made a bad choice.

Not to mention that the author suffers from the common misconception that possession of money equates with wealth.

Click to expand...

Please.

You can't be serious. Writers of such problems are always starved for coming up with new examples, and as Roger pointed out, moving money around is a very common setup to a math problem, and has been at least since I as in elementary school, and probably longer.

I can't wait to hear some of the conspiracy theories you'd come up if you saw some of the wording for the problems in my Probability book. You'd swear the authors are part of some kind of AIDS conspiracy, because of how often you calculate the probably of having it given some test or other...

The significance of this is precisely nil.

Ugh. I had to write statistics examples in an AP class textbook chapter, and trying to write politically, gender- and ethnicity-neutral examples was actually really hard. As sensitive as I try to be, the editors still found two examples where my choices 'implied' something that was problematic.

I thought the examples would be the easy part. No, definitely not.

Roger J Carlson said:

There are important things to get excited about in education today, and there are silly things. This is one of the silly things.

Money is often used to illustrate math principles. For instance, my wife taught 1st grade and one of the perennial story problems went something like this: "If Sarah* had ten pennies and gave 5 of them to Jerry*, how many pennies would she have left?"

I think there are agendas (both from the Right and the Left) with regards to education and textbooks, but this isn't one of them.

(*Or it could be Maria and Ismael)

Click to expand...

Cranky said:

I'm with Roger on this one, down to the worksheets. My second grader brought home worksheets that used money to teach math from kindergarten on. Story problems using them, too, yep.

Liberal agenda. Bah. Seems like a huge stretch, to me. Starting at bogeymen of their own creation.

Click to expand...

You're both so naive.*



















*This is a joke.

Eric Bolling needs to learn how to pick his battles.

Missing the point. The more the media morons point to ghosts, the more the irascible rabble will believe in (and be distracted by)ghosts.

Propaganda 101

Roger J Carlson said:

There are important things to get excited about in education today, and there are silly things. This is one of the silly things.

Money is often used to illustrate math principles. For instance, my wife taught 1st grade and one of the perennial story problems went something like this: "If Sarah* had ten pennies and gave 5 of them to Jerry*, how many pennies would she have left?"

I think there are agendas (both from the Right and the Left) with regards to education and textbooks, but this isn't one of them.

(*Or it could be Maria and Ismael)

Click to expand...

Absolutely. There are many different ways that people use math in their everyday lives. But money is the most obvious example, because everyone uses it. Speaking as a former kid who hated math, I think that math is probably the most common subject in which kids ask, "Why do I need to learn this stuff?" You could answer that question by saying, "If you were a farmer..." Or you could just say, "If you want to buy a ticket to a concert, you need to figure out how much it costs, how much allowance you get every week, and how long it would take you to save that much money." Which answer do you think would be more immediately relevant to a kid?

Heck, I used money-examples to teach myself negative numbers. By themselves, they're awfully abstract. But if you think of them as debt, then the idea of adding or subtracting debt, multiplying debt, etc., all makes sense.

Here, this should make Eric happy:

Distribute the wealth!

A corporation makes X dollars in 2012. Corporation has n shareholders.

X / n = wealth per corporate shareholder!!!



(ETA: and what Don said about equating money and wealth)

The assumption is that all shareholders own equal percentages of the company (which is a subchapter S corporation). I was trying to make it at 2nd grade level.

Chrissy said:

The assumption is that all shareholders own equal percentages of the company (which is a subchapter S corporation). I was trying to make it at 2nd grade level.

Click to expand...

I think the poster meant it wasn't demonstrating the distributive property.

That's the one says 2(3+4) is the same as 2*3 + 2*4, hence if you have 2x(3x+y) you end up with 6x^2 + 2xy.

cornflake said:

I think the poster meant it wasn't demonstrating the distributive property.

That's the one says 2(3+4) is the same as 2*3 + 2*4, hence if you have 2x(3x+y) you end up with 6x^2 + 2xy.

Click to expand...

Ah, I see. Thank you, cornflake. Sorry, my accounting brain was equating the distributive property with distributive share of earnings. Must re-take Algebra.

Lest I lead anyone astray with my failed attempt at a Republican dig:

Chrissy said:

Here, this should make Eric happy:

Distribute the wealth!

A corporation makes X dollars in 2012. Corporation has n shareholders.

X / n = wealth per corporate shareholder!!!

Click to expand...

RichardGarfinkle said:

You know this is wrong, right?

Click to expand...

Chrissy said:

The assumption is that all shareholders own equal percentages of the company (which is a subchapter S corporation). I was trying to make it at 2nd grade level.

Click to expand...

In an S corporation, partnership, or LLC, the annual net income is "distributed" to each shareholder/partner/LLC member in proportion to their ownership interests. Technically, this "distribution" is for tax purposes; the shareholder/partner/LLC member does not necessarily receive the money (but often does). At any rate, it is DEEMED income to them, and is taxed as income to them, personally.

In a "C" corporation (think SEC regulated corps), the annual net income of the corporation is taxed to the corporation, and is "retained" by the corporation. Any earnings the shareholders receive are generally in the form of dividends, taxable to the shareholder, deductible by the corporation, and have less to do with actual corporate earnings. Some corps never pay dividends, and the shareholders' "wealth" is only achieved through increases in stock value, which is not taxed until the stock is sold.

Since the vast majority of my clients are small businesses, I'm programmed to think of corporations as being of the former variety above, but this is not always the case, obviously.

tl;dr - I was just tryin' to be funny.

Gosh, Chrissy! Accounting is no joke! Shame on you, shame, shame, shame. *wags finger*

That said, thanks for the mini-lesson, seriously. Math was always my worst subject -- I nearly failed algebra every time I took it. Mostly because it was always so abstract to me, and made no real sense. Maybe if they'd used more concrete examples, I might've retained the information, heh. I can count back change like a champ, though. Thanks, Mrs. Dougherty! (My third grade teacher)

You're welcome! Thank you for staying awake! Sometimes when I post about this stuff I hear the voice of the Peanuts teacher in my head.

Chrissy said:

You're welcome! Thank you for staying awake! Sometimes when I post about this stuff I hear the voice of the Peanuts teacher in my head.

Click to expand...

*stares at Chrissy's rack*













hmm?

*throws book at qW from bookrack*

I wonder how they feel at FOX news about textbooks that teach creationism...