ARTICLE: The Problem with Story Problems

[Ryan Goble]

From Rethinking Schools...

The Problem with Story Problems By Anita Bright A teacher educator critiques the biases of story problems in math textbooks. Teachers around the country offer creative alternatives.

[Michael Paul Goldenberg]

I'm sorry, but is this a joke? Have you ever read THE DOT & THE LINE? Has Ms. BRIGHT ever read it? From her description of the book, which I've read many times, it appears that she either never read it or couldn't be bothered with sticking to what's in it. Instead, she goes on a twisted, self-serving trip to fantasy land, trying to make her case through utter distortion of the facts. 

Can someone explain to me how "race"/ethnicity is entailed by a book in which the three characters are, quite literally, a dot, a line, and a squiggle?

She writes, "The main character was an intelligent male—white, English-speaking, heterosexual, and someone with power—just like Frank. The other two characters were a man of color and a woman—both thinly portrayed and framed as vapid, frivolous, inept, and marginal. The female character was described as physically attractive and her body measurements were presented as a form of mathematics humor. As a female math educator myself, I was disappointed and outraged at the portrayals in this book—and even more disappointed at how dearly Frank loved this text. What did this say to me and about me, and what did it say to and about all the K–12 students in our care?"

To the extent that dots, lines, and squiggles have sexual proclivities (I'm pretty sure there is no actual sex in the book), I wonder exactly how Ms. Bright determined that the line is heterosexual. He's got a thing for the dot, yes, but that hardly precludes the possibility that he swings in more than one dimension. The issue isn't touched upon, but let's not jump to heteroist conclusions. 

The female's body measurements are humorous because she's a circle. Gosh, how sexist and bodyist and everything else -ist can that evil Norton Juster (who also wrote that paradigm of political incorrectness, THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, a crime for which he should be sent to a reeducation camp immediately, though at 87 he may be beyond redemption and hence probably should be gently executed) get? 

Is Ms. Bright a secret anti-feminist, trying to embody that old Callahan cartoon in which the angry female clerk informs the male customer, "This is a FEMINIST bookstore. There IS no Humor Section!" If not, she's doing a remarkable job towards that end nonetheless. 

I didn't read past Bright's opening salvo. Nor will I. She may be presenting a cure for racism, cancer, illiteracy, and aging, but I'll never find out. I refuse to read anything that is predicated on such dishonesty for the purpose of making something appear to be evil that is far from it. She has forfeited the right to be taken seriously by shamelessly lying about a wonderful book. It would be easy to discuss sexism, racism, etc., in math books without flatly making things up. Why she chose to do whatever the opposite of gilding the lily is in the case of the Norton Juster classic eludes me, but frankly, I don't care to know.