Newly Banned Books In The Sunshine State

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The combo of these two gives me some hope. When H and I were dating we often compared our school backgrounds. Mine was terrific public school in NY where we read a ton - several books, plays, poetry, etc, each year. H was in NC where they read very, very little and history class ended with “The War of Northern Aggression” vs mine that went all the way through Vietnam. The differences were amazing and sad.

I hope NC has truly upped its level.

Here in PA the school I work at has far less reading, and reading at grade level, than the one I attended in my youth, but it still beats what H had by a lot. One of the reasons I wouldn’t even consider moving to NC back when we were contemplating a “home” for the kids was due to his experience with the schools there. We didn’t go further north due to long winters. :wink:

Even so, we homeschooled our oldest two from 9-12 and 7-12 respectively because the high school here wasn’t up to “my” standards. With oldest we went in to talk with admin and were told, “Public school isn’t here to teach the gifted student. They’ll do well no matter where they go or what they do. Public school is here to teach the average student and around us the average student works at ____, joins the military, or goes to cc. Then we have to work with below average students because the government requires it.” My personal experience working there let me know the principal wasn’t lying.

Fortunately, the school has since changed admin and is working to provide a decent education for all now. That includes both the college bound and the trades, because certainly, not everyone needs calculus or to read the classics in depth. Everyone needs basic math (including personal finance) and being able to read beyond the first line or two of something though!

Also… to whoever said kids use Cliff Notes now, back in my day those who preferred used Cliff Notes then too - even in my really good school. That’s certainly not new.

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My sense is that the gap between good and poor college preparation has increased exponentially. Some UMC kids arrive having written weekly on Faulkner and the like; others had multiple choice tests of pop literature/movies. Hard to bridge that gulf in college.

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I agreed with you via the thumbs up, but thinking about it now, I’m not so sure it has changed considering my/H’s experience was close to 40 years ago. We met in college, but needless to say it was a much easier transition for me. My GPA was quite high. H barely graduated with a 2.0+, yet he’s a great engineer who successfully runs his own business without having to advertise - all jobs come from referrals and repeat customers. His GPA was a combo of poor prep, he failed Calc to start with whereas I had no such trouble, and lots of distractions at college coupled with no study habits.

@jeneric 's experience with their school in NC and my seeing improvement in this district in PA still gives me hope, but there will probably never be a time when all schools are equal or even close to it. There never was in the past either.

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I think the difference is that both you and your husband would have a high school 4.0 gpa now, regardless of the level of prep you had. Agree that career success does not necessarily correlate to any of this.

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Here’s the link. I think you can see one article for free.

But from the examples that the NYT gave, the rejected math books had extraneous topics unrelated to math, but related to “socioemotional learning”, such as asking students to gauge their feelings about their math work, write “math biographies” about their feelings about math, used buzz words, such as “growth mind-set” in a first grade textbook, and stories without any math in them that describe gaining self-confidence from the encouragement of friends. One textbook had sidebar brief bios of mathematicians through history, virtually all of whom were women or people of color.

Honestly, I think FL was right to reject these books. From the examples given, they read more like indoctrination into correct group thought out of 1984, than math. What disturbs me is that other states aren’t rejecting these textbooks. And yes, of course FL was scoring political points when they rejected these books so publicly. But I think that they were right to reject them. From what the NYT article showed, they look as if they’re garbage.

This is the reason that I taught my children standard, algorithmic math after school at home until middle school, at which point they were allowed into standardly taught math at the high school level. Math seems particularly subject to the whimsical pendulum swings of whatever the fad is in graduate schools of education. I’ve seen new math, spiraling curriculum with guess and check algebra before the kids even know their simple math facts, invent it for yourself math with all methods being considered equally valid. I can’t even remember the buzz-word names of all the BS math curriculum fads that I’ve seen.

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While I agree that Outlander is easily missed that is not the same as wanting it banned. I read a lot in high school and a lot of it was equally awful fluff (or worse - Sidney Sheldon anyone?) - but it’s still allowed me to develop a life-long love of reading and I read plenty of classics as well. While it’s certainly possible to develop a love of reading as an adult, it’s much easier as a child/teen. Letting kids read what they want won’t hurt them - I read all kinds of things off my parents’ book shelves - Love Story (age 12 to my grandfather’s horror and no one loved books more than he did), Manchild in the Promised Land and Education of a WASP were some particularly memorable ones that are directly on point for this current round of bans many years later. I still read and my kid read a lot for pleasure up until a couple of years ago when she simply ran out of time. They have read a bunch of classics - from ancient times to present in high school.

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I agree. The question is, should resource-pressed school libraries use their paltry funds to buy Outlander for their collection, or a different book?

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That’s awesome that it helped you develop a love of reading. It did just the opposite for my son. He LOVED reading up until high school. It became drudgery for him. All of the required reading of things he had no interest in. He had no time to read for pleasure but was forced to read and analyze and over analyze those readings he hated. He no longer reads at all. It’s sad.

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Reading that article I get the total opposite reaction you got. Other than yes, they should put some white guys in their biographies along with anyone from China, India, Arabia, and elsewhere who developed math (seems Greece could provide plenty), and then those more recent like Dorothy Johnson, the rest is quite good for kids.

In my own math classes I encourage kids to actually think about math, not just be a human calculator. Being able to understand concepts rather than steps goes a long way, and reasoning out math also helps students reason out other things. One of my biggest beefs with math classes is they seem to be in a vacuum, not integrated into life. Math does better when it’s part of life, not some separate, scary, field of its own.

From the article:

Until recently, the idea of building social-emotional skills was a fairly uncontroversial one in American education. Research suggests that students with these skills earn higher test scores.

“Feelings arise all the time — they arise when we’re doing work at our offices, and when kids are learning things,” she said. “It makes sense to try and engage those feelings or grapple with them in order to be more effective at the thing we’re doing.”

“A math biography is a way of helping kids,” Professor Jones said. “There is a fair amount of evidence that indicates that if you can surface your uncertainty and anxiety about something, it’s easier to grapple with it and manage it.”

Timothy Dohrer, director of teacher leadership at Northwestern University, called that “shortsighted” and said research showed that incorporating social-emotional learning into texts helped students learn social skills.

“If you asked 100 C.E.O.s what skills they want in a new hire, the top five skills are going to be about social-emotional learning — not algebra,” he said.

“Are you a nice person to talk to? Are you going to be a good co-worker?” Professor Dohrer added. “We know that the best way to teach that is to combine it with math, social studies, whatever.”

Regardless, few teachers have kids do everything within a math book. We pick out problems we think are helpful and skip over others. There’s absolutely no reason teachers couldn’t have done the same with these - and if students read some of the sides on their own, great. Nothing I read would have hurt a single student. Absolutely nothing.

If this had been in there… I’d have agreed with you. Whoever decided to teach that in math class… well I’d best not write my thoughts about it here. I believe it was in Everyday Math and then later in one we taught in the high school that’s name escapes me now, but was equally as bad. Fortunately, our school finally tossed both!

That’s totally different than asking kids to be able to reason through their answers/styles to truly understand the math concept they’re working with.

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Both of us had a 4.0 high school GPA then too…

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You missed my point (or I said it badly). It was being allowed to read whatever I wanted that developed the lifelong love of reading, not the assigned reading (which sometimes had other benefits, but that wasn’t one).

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Oh agreed. Again I think the difference is not the choice between two books but literally taking one off the shelves and banning it or otherwise publicly deciding that that book or type of books is not welcome/allowed. That said I was lucky I could get my trashy novels and my social commentary off my parents’ shelves (they were also big readers) - most kids are not so lucky so having a diversity of books available to appeal to all tastes in a library is important.

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Here is an example that Florida provided as a reason why a particular math book was not approved.

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The biggest problem I have with this is trying to assume that the results can be fitted to a polynomial and that the resulting equation has any meaning whatsoever. This is a classic case of overfitting using limited data, and anyone who has taken AP Stats should know that.

Separately, there is an implication that what is shown is meaningful, which is separate from whether or not it is accurate.

One might ask, if the results are accurate (they very well might be), is it wrong to show them? Well, consider a math problem considering a different issue, one of crime. Would you be equally comfortable with a graph showing crime rates by either income or race? Would those graphs be equally “intriguing”?

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Seems that “word problems” that try to do this are often the most disliked ones by both students and those who may not like some of them based on political reasons.

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I have no problem with a student working on problems like those - or with crime. It’s real life and kids ought to be able to look at real life to assess what’s out there - then, in other classes, how to fix them.

When I teach Stats I like to show examples of bad studies to let kids figure out why they aren’t well designed.

I’m never in favor of keeping high schoolers in a bubble - not so fond of it in middle school either.

I tend to think a lot of mental issues come about when the bubble bursts and they see real life for what it is - fairly akin to never letting youngsters fall or fail, then they grow up not knowing how to handle a failure.

One of my favorite things to tell a class at some point is, “My generation is hoping yours can fix the problems we couldn’t.” It could be curing cancer. It could be cleaning the environment. It could be ending crime/poverty. It could be ending racism/sexism. Any problem.

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Sometimes, but two in the books we used that really aggravated me were (paraphrased since I didn’t memorize exact words):

Figuring out the answer for something tossed in the air when it had a couple of unknowns. A math/science savvy kid should have tossed the pull of gravity (a known) in there and solved it quickly. The math book had them doing parallel problems to eliminate one variable, then solving for it, using it to solve the second - and the correct value for gravity wasn’t the answer! Heck, put an unknown planet into the word problem or something if you don’t want the smart kid (recognizing reality) to get it wrong…

Using trig to find the height of a mountain and expecting the answer to be correct to the tenths. Significant digits would have had the answer to the hundreds. We teach significant digits (and why) in science - why can’t they be used in word problems in math as well? Not using them makes kids think we can get far more accurate than we can.

Teaching both math and science, I have massive issues with the non-integration of the two subjects that those teaching “just” math (or sometimes science) at the high school level don’t even comprehend. They think I’m nuts… maybe I am.

OTOH, there might be a reason that kids in my classes who took the state tests tended to do (much) better than those in others classes.

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Don’t give up hope! My older S read a lot until middle or high school. Then I don’t think he read another book at all until after college. But now, he reads a TON! Granted, they’re books that I can’t see anyone else wanting to read (economic, human psyche type books) but never in a million years would I have guessed he’d read like that.

I was the same way, but it took me awhile longer to pick it back up. In 2005 I made a New Year’s resolution to read 10 books that year. Ever since then, I’ve done at least that and usually am around 40/years. Of course, I read the fluffy fun murder mysteries/thrillers.

But you never know!

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Yes! My older D is graduating in 2 weeks and she just said she can’t wait to go back to reading for fun again. She says she hasn’t read a book in 4 years- she didn’t have an English or History class in college.

Despite my cliff notes habit in high school, I read everything in college, and only liked about half of it. I love to read for fun now- mostly fluff. I loved shelving books in the school library. I read a lot of books the kids were reading. Percy Jackson was so entertaining. It is now required reading for 6th grade.

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Her classes in whatever other subjects had no books at all?

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Textbooks- mostly financial/business- not novels. She was done with gen-ed thanks to IB.

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