On one level, we already understood that “Florida math” is not the same as “math”:
Problem 1: In an election, the Republican candidate gets 232 electoral votes and the Democratic candidate gets 306. Who won?
Problem 2: Florida had 153 coronavirus deaths per 100,000 people last year, while California had just 58 per 100,000. How much higher is the death rate in Florida?
Answer: I will do my own research.
It’s easy to laugh at Florida’s claim that there are 28 math textbooks for “Attempts by publishers to indoctrinate students” with such “Special Topics” such 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 appalled at the “indoctrinating concepts” I saw. If this is Precalculus With Limits I would hate to see the kind with no limits.
At a time when Floridians by law say “not gay,” let alone “trans,” this banned book brazenly teaches about the “transitive property of equality.” Suggestible minds are not only taught about “transformation of functions,” they are even indoctrinated in “describe transformations” and — frighteningly — “sketching transformations.”
At a time when DeSantis is attempting to restore the traditional definition of marriage between a man and a woman, “Precalculus With Limits” contains endless references to “sin” and “polynomials” — even “multiplying polynomials.” For example, on page 318, it tells children to believe that “sin x takes on its full range of values.” Appreciate Sin! Incredibly, on page 734 the children are asked to “sketch the graph of the degenerate conic.” Disgusting.
At a time when Florida forbids recognition of gender fluidity or any identity outside of male and female, this subversive textbook unabashedly tells suggestive children that such things as “mutual identities,” “co-function identities,” “additive identity traits,” and even ” multiplicative identity property.”
Right now, all Floridians should be fighting the Radical Socialists, but Precalculus With Limits invites kids to find the “simplest form of a radical equation,” or even take an ordinary equation and “rewrite it with a radical.” Which radical? Saul Alinsky?
I’m not exaggerating. Or even parabolic.
This dreadful tome is packed with mentions of “regression” and other forms of deviation (“define conics in terms of eccentricity,” it commands); It seeks to promote forbidden teachings about sexuality by requiring young people to identify “the product of conjugated couples.”
Some of his indoctrinating concepts are just plain crude (“Gaussian Elimination”), while others are downright gross. “The chord perpendicular to the axis of the parabola is called the latus rectum,” it says on page 702. Florida’s children go on to “find the length of the latus rectum.” I don’t even want to know how that works.
As radical as it is dirty, “Precalculus With Limits” seeks to subvert parental authority. On page 74, it teaches children how to “write an equation for the transformation of the super function,” and even provides “plotting points” for “translating a super function.” Had this book come into classrooms, children would have drawn parents out of existence with a “double stem-and-leaf plot.”
The textbook insidiously sneaks critical race theory into the curriculum. It teaches children to “classify by discriminant” and its author seems obsessed with the far-left concept of tackling inequalities: “solving linear inequalities” (p. 40), “how to solve a polynomial inequality” (p. 184 ), “Resolving a system of inequalities” (p. 512). The book blatantly and repeatedly commands students to “solve the inequality” even though they did not cause it and are not responsible for it.
Don’t you think it’s about color? Explain this well on page 512: “Shading the solution of each inequality in a system with a different colored pencil makes identifying the solution of the system of inequalities easier.”
Thanks to DeSantis, Florida’s children will never have to learn about such “indoctrinating concepts.” In fact, they don’t have to learn much at all.
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