Dear Text Book Company don't you have anything else to do?

This has been building up inside me for a while and today I coming out with guns blazing.

The annual revenue for these companies is in the multi-billion dollars a year and they get it solely from ripping off schools, taxpayers and scholars through a process called planned obsolence. That is a business term that basically means you build something but make it last for only a short period of time so the purchaser needs to buy another one every few years thus maximizing profits.  Who are these companies? They are the textbook manufactures and they have the biggest marketing scam since car makers started calling station wagons SUV's.  When it comes to text books especially math and handwriting there is not much you can change but when you are in the business of selling textbooks you have to get creative so you can convince schools and teachers that they need to upgrade their textbooks frequently.  How do they do that?  It's simple hire a bunch of pointy headed intellectuals with PhD's and creative minds.

Math vocabulary challenge.  I'll give you the definition you tell me the word.  A mathematical operation on a sum (total) and an addend, which can be called the difference.  Feel free to post you answer in the comment section at the bottom of the page.

Before I put forth some examples let me tell you a little be about textbooks.  As a reminder I work with scholars in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade so we are talking about the basics.  If you are like me you have to be thinking that not much has changed with handwriting, addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication but you are so wrong.  I have in my hands a third grade math book.  It's the hardback teachers addition and I'll review with you the number of people it took to write this book.  There are six program authors (3 with PhD's), two contributors (1 with a PhD), five historians/scholars (4 with PhD's), one Indiana consultant, four Indiana reviewers, and sixteen editorial advisory board members (2 with PhD's).  That is a total of thirty four people of which ten have PhD's.  Ridiculous right?  But when you have to maximize your profits and you are working with simple math you need a lot of people to put their heads together to come up with a way to make the current book obsolete.  How to do you do that?  You change the terminology.  Y'all ready for this?  By the way those are song lyrics from the theme song for the movie Space Jam.

HOW TO EARN TEN MILLION DOLLARS.  You change the word "number" to "integer" in the glossary of a third grade math book.

HOW TO MAKE IT TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS.  You no longer "borrow" when subtracting.  You now "ungroup".

HOW TO MAKE IT THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS.  You no longer have "synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms".  You have "synonyms, antonyms, and homophones".  Actually you have homophones and homographs.  By the way be careful how you pronounce homophones as it does not sound like it looks.

HOW TO MAKE IT FORTY MILLION DOLLARS and my personal favorite.  You change the way you make the upper case cursive Q.  That's right it no longer looks like the number two.

Math vocabulary challenge number two.  Here is the definition you tell me the word.  To open up 1 in a given place to make 10 of the next smaller place value in order to subtract.

HOW TO BUY A HUGE HOUSE ON MULTIPLE ACRES, TIME SHARES, LUXURY CARS, AND CONDOMINIUMS ON PRIVATE ISLANDS..  When adding fractions with different denominators you no long find the "least common denominator".  You now find the "least common multiple".

The sad part of all of this comes down to one simple item, the parental unit who is now tasked with helping their scholar at home with home work.  As I mentioned previously eighty nine percent of our scholars are eligible for free or reduced price meals at school.  This means that an equal number of parental units fall in the low social-economic category called the working poor and in all likelihood barely made it through high school.  How do you think they are going to react when they try and help their third grade scholar with homework when the see "ungrouping", "integer", "addend", "least common multiple", and homophones? Probably the same as I did when I first encountered these words, confused.  And here is what scares me.  I work with six scholars who have serious anger control issues and I've met their parental units who I know first hand can get very vocal to the point of angry.  So what risk is a scholar at when his parental unit erupts because they don't know what an integer is?  Probably pretty high and who is at risk for the harm?  The scholar who is only trying to get his homework complete.

I've worked for thirty four years for a for profit management services company so I'm not opposed to a company maximizing profits.  However, I am opposed to a multi-billion dollar a year company making vasts sums of money by changing text book terms that had stood for years.  Some may call these changes academic progress but I call it academic bullshit.  Sorry Sister, I'll say a couple Our Father's and a few Hail Mary's at mass on Sunday.