We live in a world of book banning, book burning and smut-hunting illiterati stalking the halls of libraries that they would never have entered for the purpose of reading or study, but will to harass and censor. Yes, the year is 2022 and this is what passes for normal in America. The center for this bizarre activity is none other than Florida.
Florida is Ron DeSantis fiefdom. He rules the state senate and the state legislature as well as being the governor. If he introduced a bill tomorrow to change the name of the place to Floronis, I for one wouldn’t bat an eye. I can see him donning a laurel wreath, white robes and sandals as he lounges in his villa, the breeze blowing the sheer curtains as he gazes on the vineyards and raises a chalice, a modern day Roman emperor.
DeSantis speaks of Florida in terms of his own private kingdom. He was quoted recently as saying, “I can’t have Castro to my south and Stacey Abrams to my north.” Uh hem…Miguel Diaz-Canel took over from Raul Castro in 2018. Plus, isn’t Florida a state, still? One of the United States? Doesn’t that fellow Biden have something to say about relations with Cuba?
Emperor Ron is having his legislature pass a new gerrymandered map which is dedicated to giving the GOP four more House seats and conveniently make things harder for Val Demings in her Senate race. When not busy doing this, he has found time to reject 41% of the 132 math books submitted for review because they “incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including [critical race theory].”
CRT, as you well know, is the “examination of racism and its impact through systems, such as legal, housing and education.” It is taught at the graduate level, not at K-12, but that teensy weensy fact which makes all the difference in the world is the one that is left out of the mad right-wing disinformation campaign against the subject. All this brou ha ha is to ban the teaching of a subject that wasn’t being taught in the first place. In any other political era but this one, it would be unbelievable. For this era, it’s the norm.
So since we need to laugh before we unscrew our heads and give up altogether, here is Dana Milbank giving you his spin on what he imagines is DeSantis’ spin since there are words like “sin” “equality” “transformative” and “rectum” which unquestionably sent the smut hunters and evangelicals into a world class tizzy.
These two examples are what GOPers would indeed get into the textbooks if they could. And they might, at the rate things are going.
Problem 1: In an election, the Republican candidate gets 232 electoral votes and the Democratic candidate gets 306. Who won?
Answer: It was rigged.
Problem 2: Florida had 153 coronavirus deaths per 100,000 people over the past year while California had only 58 per 100,000. How much higher is Florida’s death rate?
Answer: I’m going to do my own research.
It’s easy to laugh at Florida’s claim that it rejected 28 math textbooks over “publishers’ attempts to indoctrinate students” with such “special topics” as CRT, “culturally responsive teaching,” “social justice” and “social emotional learning.”
But then I opened the 2020 edition of one of the banned textbooks, Cengage’s “Precalculus With Limits” — and was horrified by the “indoctrinating concepts” I saw. If this is Precalculus With Limits, I’d hate to see the kind without limits.
At a time when Floridians by law “don’t say gay,” much less “trans,” this banned book brazenly teaches about the “Transitive Property of Equality.” Not only are impressionable minds taught about the “transformation of functions,” but also they are even indoctrinated in “describing transformations” and — appallingly — “sketching transformations.”
At a time when DeSantis is trying to restore the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, “Precalculus With Limits” has endless references to “sin” and “polynomials” — even “multiplying polynomials.” On Page 318, for example, it tells children to believe that “sin x takes on its full range of values.” Valuing sin! On Page 734, incredibly, it orders children to “sketch the graph of the degenerate conic.” Disgusting.
At a time when Florida is banning the acknowledgment of gender fluidity or any identity outside male and female, this subversive textbook unabashedly tells suggestible children that such things exist as “reciprocal identities,” “cofunction identities,” “additive identity property” and even “multiplicative identity property.”
I know none of these concepts, but I seriously believe that DeSantis censors looked at words like “degenerate” and “sin” and banned the book on that basis, having no clue what the word means in math. Unless you can find some other justification? This is plain nuts. Milbank rubs it in.
Some of its indoctrinating concepts are merely gross (“Gaussian elimination”), while others are downright disgusting. “The focal chord perpendicular to the axis of the parabola is called the latus rectum,” it says on Page 702. It goes on to tell Florida’s children to “find the length of the latus rectum.” I don’t even want to know how that is done.
What else can you do but laugh. The State of Florida seriously banned this from the schools. This is so off the rails.
.@EducationFL just announced they're banning dozens of math textbooks they claim "indoctrinate" students with CRT. They won't tell us what they are or what they say b/c it’s a lie.#DeSantis has turned our classrooms into political battlefields and this is just the beginning. ?? pic.twitter.com/AliAGRDJIW
— Rep. Carlos G Smith (@CarlosGSmith) April 15, 2022
Apparently CRT is being taught in mathematics in Florida, so the @EducationFL has banned some of the math books.
No, this is not 1963, it’s 2022 in the “Free State of Florida” ?. https://t.co/eEDO6Qtnrj
— Shevrin “Shev” Jones (@ShevrinJones) April 16, 2022
I get it. The goal of math is to solve problems which the Republican Party of Florida doesn't like to do. https://t.co/GDWvZi7miZ
— Rep. Anna V. Eskamani ? (@AnnaForFlorida) April 15, 2022
I am speechless. This is the weirdest thing I have ever seen a Republican do and that is saying a mouthful.
Look for the mockery to continue to be brutal because the act itself is so inexplicably insane.
I seem to be facing issues taking me back to high school (and in this case a little in college) today. I had a full year of Trigonometry when I was a junior and although he hated me for reasons I’ve never been able to learn he was a damned good teacher. Anyway, what we were taught using modern terms included Sine, which originally was called Sin. I guess some have decided to go truly old-school in their terminology. To evangelicals using math to learn about “Sin” is exactly the kind of thing that would get their attention. However, what has to drive them bat-shit insane is getting into Cosin/Cosine! Co! OMFG! I can only imagine their horror at seeing the “relationship” between Sine and Cosine waves drawn on a page and actual fancy schmancy math forumulas explaining it all. As you’ve noted there is all manner of mathmatical terms that drive these idiots (so often by choice as they refuse actual education) over the edge. This would all be a weird combination of hilarious and sad if it wasn’t so dangerous.
Actually, the function is called “sine” but its abbreviated to “sin” just as the other functions have their own abbreviations (cosine is cos; tangent is tan; secant is sec; cotangent is cot; cosecant is csc).
I’m guessing your “Sine, which originally was called Sin” was supposed to be some sort of “humor” but “Sine” has always been “sine” in English which derives from the Latin “sinus” which was a mistranslation/mistransliteration from Arabic. Standard written Arabic doesn’t feature vowels as we think of them in English and so the original Arabic form, borrowed from Sanskrit, was “jiba” meaning “bow” (as in “and arrow”) or “arc” but it was transliterated as “jayb” meaning “pocket” (which is one of the meanings of “sinus” in Latin). (The Arabic form uses the letters jim, ya and ba–roughly equivalent to the Hebrew letters gimel, yod and beth. But, again, as standard Arabic doesn’t write vowels–these are typically written with a series of diacritics–one has to use context to fully understand; “long vowels” are depicted in Arabic largely by the use of the letters alif, ya and wa but context is still required to understand when the letter is being used as a consonant or as a vowel. Both “jayb” and “jiba” fall into that gray area where ya’s vowel use isn’t easy to distinguish from its consonant usage.)
He’s also trying to turn the universities into re-education camps: killing tenure and protections for teachers as well as limiting what they can teach.
Kwame buys 6 sticks of licorice, Johnny buys 4 bars of white chocolate….
BANNED – CRT!!!!!!
Unless Floridians get off their rather rotund asses and vote, Florida is probably going to become something indistinguishable from a separate country. Of course we’ll then be able to say “Biden has to deal with death sentence in the south”. Cuba becomes one country removed as it were. Honestly, getting rid of Florida as a state would not be a bad thing.
Florida. Like Texas, only dumber.