Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Math Education

Florida’s Department of Education recently rejected 54 math textbooks for classes K-12. This blog post is not about the reasons given for the rejections of these books but a comment on a tweet about this from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

The governor’s tweet said: “Math is about getting the right answer, not about feelings or ideologies. In Florida, we will be educating our children, not indoctrinating them.”

The teaching of math is not only about getting the right answer but in learning to think mathematically. In other words, to arrive at the right answer one often first has to frame a problem in way that can be solved by using math. Specific problems and their solutions may have an emotional component.

An example of how to use math to get insight on a particular issue, in this case not ideological nor emotional, is the question of whether a rectangular television screen or a square television screen has the greatest viewing area for a given diagonal length.

The correct answer is a square, but how does one determine that? While it is fairly easy using calculus to determine that the largest area of a rectangle with a given perimeter is a square, it is more difficult to prove that a square also provides a larger area than that of any other rectangle with the same diagonal. You have to be able to think like a mathematician to prove this. Not all math is learning rote skills to get the correct answer, as DeSantis implies. (Since I don’t have the proof, I am going to resort to that statement in math textbooks which annoys math students no end: the proof is left as an exercise for the reader.)

As a final comment, in the example I gave, some may see a public policy issue. As the aspect of television screens changed to become more rectangular, television manufacturers characterized their models by diagonal size, not area. This may have misled some into thinking that a television set with an equal diagonal to their old square one had the same viewing area. This is not an issue I think is worth fretting much about, but only a way of saying that using math to get insight into real issues can have implications.