Don’t miss today’s hilarious column in the Washington Post by Dana Milbank, www.washingtonpost.com/… Under the headline “Desantis Saves Florida Kids From Being Indoctrinated by Math”, he gets the ball rolling with the following quotes:
“When Florida released the names Monday of the 54 math textbooks it had rejected, most for allegedly including “critical race theory” or other “prohibited topics,” I was struck by how the publishers had adjusted their titles to reflect the state’s singular interpretation of the subject matter.
...There is math — and then there is Florida math. On one level, we already understood that “Florida math” is not the same thing as “math”:
Problem 1: In an election, the Republican candidate gets 232 electoral votes and the Democratic candidate gets 306. Who won?
Answer: It was rigged.”
Some other choice quotes:
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.”
And then there’s this:
“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.”
Milbank concludes:
“Thanks to DeSantis, Florida’s children will never have to learn about such “indoctrinating concepts.” In fact, they won’t have to learn much of anything at all.”
In these grim times, this column offers some comic relief.