Claim: The Mississippi state legislature removed fractions and decimal points from the mathematics curriculum of public secondary schools.
Status: True.
Origins: First
Alabama tried to redefine the value of pi to 3. Then Kansas removed the requirement for teaching evolution in its public schools. We thought it couldn't get any worse, but then Mississippi came along and proved us wrong:
13 August 1999
Jackson, MS -- Bolstered by the state of Kansas' recent measure removing the requirement for the teaching of evolution in public schools, yesterday afternoon the Mississippi legislature passed a bill eliminating fractions and decimal points from the mathematics curriculum of all public secondary schools in the state.
"Despite the coincidental timing of the measure, this was no whim," asserted Mississippi state senator Cassius de Spain. "We'd had the issue under consideration for several months now."
The bill, which cleared the Mississippi Senate by a vote of "a lot" to "a little" (with "this many" senators abstaining) after some initial confusion over how many votes constitute a "majority," directs public secondary schools in Mississippi to emphasize whole number arithmetic in mathematics courses and orders the removal of questions involving non-integer mathematics from standardized state tests after 1999. The fate of percentages remains undetermined as educators attempt to work out an alternative scoring method for tests.
Judith Sutpen, chairperson of the Mississippi Senate Education committee, defended the legislature's action against charges that it was motivated by "controversial religious beliefs."
"This has absolutely nothing to do with religion," she told reporters at a press conference Friday morning. "We're simply seeking to make mathematics more accessible to schoolchildren by de-emphasizing the elements that so many of them find confusing. It makes no sense to try to train our students how to think logically, then present them with nonsensical concepts such as 'irrational' and 'imaginary' numbers."
Senate minority leader Cora Tull indicated that religion did play a part in the passage of the legislation, however, maintaining that "if cardinality is good enough for the Catholic church, it ought to be good enough for the children of the great state of Mississippi." She added that "'improper fractions' have no place in any respectable school system, public or private."
Freshman senator John Sartoris of Brookhaven elaborated on the reasons for his colleagues' support of the bill: "We're sick and tired of hearing about how everything in our culture, from art to entertainment to education, is aimed at the 'lowest common denominator' of society. We're took aggressive action to do something about it yesterday by eliminating that denominator."
School librarians expressed concern about whether they will be able to continue categorizing books according to the Dewey decimal system once the law goes into effect, but Jason Compson, chief librarian for the Greater Biloxi School District, opined that "anyone who couldn't beat that pinko Truman doesn't deserve a place of honor in our schools' libraries anyway."
Several senators indicated that an additional measure aimed at removing "irregular verbs" from English classes might be in the offing.
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i know this is old news, but its new to me. i never would have thought that i would ever hear the line- "'improper fractions' have no place in any respectable school system, public or private."
and now they want to eliminate irregular verbs? remember how up in arms they were at the thought of 'ebonics' being taught in predominately black school systems? (a ridiculous idea as well, i know. just pointing out the hypocricy)
isnt it clear that steps are being taken blatantly to promote ignorance by our more 'special' states in the union? is it surprising that this same culture wants to replace science with religion, distort the english language (irregular verbs),
and declare fractions and decimals to be the devil?
i know feceman will come down on me for using the term "dumb rednecks"
but if the shoe fits....
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Doesn't suprise me at all in the UK standardised tests have had consistantly simpler questions to answer over the last 16 years, since the testing regime altered. A dumbed down world sadly.
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"Oh, well ... Mississippi"; that was my first response. My second response is that it didn't seem to be true, no matter what Snopes thinks: you can see Mississippi math curiculum online, and they still include fractions . My last response? I clicked on the link at the bottom of Snopes, which lead me to a page stating that the entire article was a lie designed to teach a lesson--namely, that you can't believe something just because you find it on a seemingly authoritative web-page.
So, um ... lesson learned?
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Last edited by Gregory on Dec 31st, 2005 at 05:17 PM
Gender: Unspecified Location: With Cinderella and the 9 Dwarves
WHAT THE **** ...Mathematics isn't something you change.....Math just IS. The only truth we have.....how can you ...that's just too painful....god. But wait..maybe I misunderstood, what exactly are secondary school? Is iut for kids between lets sa 1 and 1.5 (oh shit did I jsut break a law?). Now I can understand if you start out with Real Numbers in Elementary School and slowly raise the bar to calculus and such..but just banning ...how utterly stupid and strange.
Oh and Pi = 3 (best joke I ever heard) ....sorry to you sane americans but "Something is rotten in the states of America"
[edit] Removing Irregular Verbs: Right, since modern english isn't to simple anyways (now I know that english as a whole is a beautiful and complex language, but the more...:"special" people can get along with around three verbs and a few nouns)
i must let out a big "WTF". i mean, it IS a factchecker site.
so i guess the lesson is "we at snopes, after all the time and hard work we put into fact checking, have decided to throw in some false facts to prove to you that you shouldnt believe what you read on a fact checking site...which pretty much renders all our work useless and this site benign by that very philosophy...wait a minute...why the hell are we paying for this domain then? ATTENTION: snopes.com will be shutting down indefinately. have a nice life"
Yup, someone got burned by Snopes' joke section! That area was quite famous for a little while, actually.
But it is an interesting experiment in the acceptance of authority- that people will believe the patently ridiculous because a site like Snopes says so.
Perhaps the best lesson here is that Snopes always produces its sources- always worth a surface check of them before posting anything as fact.
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after the addition of 'intelligent design' to the science curriculum in kansas,and the attempted addition of 'ebonics' to inner city school curiculums, tell me please...what counts as 'patently ridiculous'? where you see a brick wall i see a hair thin line...and a blurry one at that.
well, thats where we disagree completely ush.
i see the merging of science and religion, as well
as the factual attempt to bastardise the english language
as equally ridiculous...
but anyway, its clear that there is no purpose for this thread.
could you please close it?
well, i have no problem being a public ass,
but i do have a problem with contributing to the spread of misinformation.
if you want you can close this one and ill open another thread
titled "LOOK AT ME!!! IM AN ASS!!!! THATS ME!!! PVS THE ASS!!!!"
Gender: Unspecified Location: With Cinderella and the 9 Dwarves
Well, I totally fell for it....either shows that I am really stupid or that I don't trust the american states as far as I can spit a rat......I prefer to hope for the second.
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Dec 31st, 2005 02:44 PM
