I did a social justice math project for a class once. It taught actual math, though.

The theme was comparing the price of a gallon of milk in different places and seeing if we found a correlation between racial composition and/or income.

Interestingly, the places with the most expensive milk were poor white neighborhoods.

I wonder how many 14 year olds in the US, can reliably tell you how many ounces in a cup , cups in a pint, pints in a quart, quarts in a gallon, and ounces in a pound?

Those basic blocks of measurement that you need to even compare the prices of different sizes of product in the various stores.

Teaching a lesson that almost everything is more expensive in a convenience store would be a good one. But if you can’t do the applied arithmetic, you will never know.
And if you aren’t spending your own hard earned money, not a lot of incentive to find out.

Took me six months to convince my daughter in law that the big packages of fresh mushrooms from Sams were way cheaper than the canned ones in the grocery store. The cans were mostly water.

She isn’t stupid. Just a product of the Portlandia city schools.

Ever wonder why being financially successful in life requires almost nothing beyond the ability to keep track of prices and the self discipline to defer gratification?

Well, of course, you were there with your DIL and I wasn't, so chances are she wasn't thinking of this, but for many people, there's another factor to consider; can you eat or preserve those fresh mushrooms before they go bad?

I once succumbed to the temptation to buy a dented 3-liter tin of olive oil, since it was heavily discounted. What I didn't know was that olive oil, once opened, is only good for two years - and I could NOT have finished it in that time period, since I only used it when the recipe called for it. While I didn't really notice/mind the change in how it tasted, other people likely did. Not smart. I'll never do that again.

“Well, of course, you were there with your DIL and I wasn't, so chances are she wasn't thinking of this, but for many people, there's another factor to consider; can you eat or preserve those fresh mushrooms before they go bad?”

Even the poor in the US have freezers now Lenona. Cooked mushrooms freeze better than raw ones, but we use them primarily in spaghetti sauce and other freezable pasta dishes.

Olive oil can be stored in the freezer successfully as well.

My daughter in law doesn’t know enough about cooking yet, to make these judgments. Her problem is basic comparison math( calculating price per ounce).

Ever watched the purchases of someone ahead of you using an EBT card? I have. It becomes readily apparent that most can neither cook, nor do math.

In all fairness, I did read (somewhere) that the 2 plus 2 equals 5 had to do with a non-base 10 system. I don’t know who habitually uses/used a non base 10 system. Last I looked, human standard, regardless of culture or color was 10 fingers.
When I taught early childhood math I really reinforced base 10 with finger counting and base 10 unit blocks. I never once had a student trying to spontaneously operate in another base system.

Even the poor in the US have freezers now Lenona.
__________________________________

Yes, but when one buys in bulk, one has to be organized and disciplined enough to cook, divide the food into the right-sized containers, LABEL them with the names and dates, freeze them, and then make sure they don't fall prey to freezer burn.

(Not to mention the American tendency to dislike eating the same entree two days in a row, which is followed by the dislike of leftovers, which become less emotionally appealing every day, even in the freezer.)

First World problems, I realize. It reminds me of this unbelievable tale of adult self-pity. The writer seems to have gained NO perspective since her childhood.

http://www.foodwoolf.com/2010/12/hungry-kids-in-us.html

Bottom line: Any household that has food with bugs in it either is a household that has too MUCH food or is severely lacking in self-discipline and organization. When money is tight, there's no excuse to let food go to waste - or to let kids think they're entitled to Fluffernutter sandwiches BETWEEN meals instead of, say, apples.

"I don’t know who habitually uses/used a non base 10 system. Last I looked, human standard, regardless of culture or color was 10 fingers."

Non based 10 systems are used extensively in industry today since the advent of computers.

The teachers' unions are learning from their friends in the welfare bureaucracy, or maybe from their adventures on the street as Antifa terrorists. None of these groups has any desire to ever actually solve the problem they were hired to solve, because then they wouldn't have their jobs anymore.

"In all fairness, I did read (somewhere) that the 2 plus 2 equals 5 had to do with a non-base 10 system." ~Cindy

Then you were lied to. In any base system that includes a 5 2+2=4. End of debate.

2+2=5 originated in George Orwell's 1984. The point was if you tell a lie often enough and forcefully enough you can get people to repeat it and believe it no matter how obviously wrong it is.

Which brings us to today with the 2+2=5 guy on twitter. The guy tried to bring up all kinds of excuses for why 2+2=5 no matter how obviously incorrect that is. He talked about how people have different lived experiences. He talked about numerical precision and tolerancing. He talked about feelings. Racism. Yada yada.

End of story he is wrong. None of that matters. 2+2=4.

As for the jokes about different bases:
1+1=10 (binary)
5+5=A (hex)

But in every numerical system with a 5 it is still 2+2=4.

An add on, Cindy.

While base 10 is the most common historical counting system (prior to computers at least), there are a number of cultures that used different system. Some of them still impact us today.

Why are there 60 seconds in a minute? Why 60 minutes to an hour? Why not 10, 100, 1000?

Well, because the Sumerians started making clocks and measuring time around the 24th century BC and we still use their system of notation. The Sumerians used a mixture of base 12 and base 60. A number of other cultures used base 12 (ancient Egypt for one). This appears to originate from 4 fingers and three bones per finger leading to a base 12 counting system. Why no thumb? Why only one hand? Who knows? But base 12 is the next most common counting system after base 10. So where the heck did base 60 come from for clocks? Once again who knows? 60 is 12*5. But that is still rather arbitrary.

If you are curious on the subject there are numerous web pages covering the different rationalizations and theories. Just remember every time you marked time you were using a base 60 system without even realizing it.

"In all fairness, I did read (somewhere) that the 2 plus 2 equals 5 had to do with a non-base 10 system."

Non-base 10 are sometimes used in computer programming. I've had to deal with the "big-little endian" problem several times. Binary, octal, and hexadecimal. However, in any system which has the value "5" 2+2 would ALWAYS equal 4. So it is definitely NOT about a different system. It is about the claims math and science and actual answers being "racist" when they disagree with what the woke Feel the answer should be.

Lenona,

Having read that foodwolf link all I can wonder is . . . how much did she pay for those comments at the bottom.

I seem to remember hearing that negative comments were banned at that blog, in general.

But if you'd like to hear negative comments about the same story at ANOTHER forum...

1. I had a next door neighbor "single mom" with a little girl much like this... the kid knocked on my door on several occasions asking to "borrow" some mac and cheese, eggs, peanut butter, etc...I'd ask, "Where is your mom?" Then she'd tell me that she was asleep, which I didn't doubt but passed out would have been a better description. I knew the girl's grandmother, who was a decent person, so I tattled to her about the care that her grandbrat was receiving at the hands of her daughter and they moved not long after that. In addition to her asking for food, she had asked me for rides to school when she saw me leaving for work, which I didn't give her for a variety of reasons the main one being that LATE kids have to be "checked in" and I didn't want MY NAME on anything...

2. ...It wasn't lost on me that she has this seething anger toward the neighbor, yet seemingly no animosity for the (parents) who PUT her in the position to have to ask a neighbor for food. She is writing this as an adult, so SURELY she can now see that while she was suffering and hungry, that neighbor had no way of knowing it! For all the neighbor knew, this little girl was somewhat "off" and maybe had plenty of food, but just not what she wanted, like kids often do when they say, "There's NOTHING to eat here!", which in fact there's plenty of food only it isn't frozen pizzas or Klondike Bars. She also keeps referring to the lady as "rich" but SHE lived next door! It wasn't as if she had walked a mile from her home in the ghetto and started randomly knocking on the doors of the wealthy!...No casserole or spare change from a neighbor could have saved that child from the life that followed Mrs Drinkwater not wanting to get involved....

3. The Drinkwaters are anything but rich if the moo stays home and raises kids on the single income of a pilot. They don't make as much as you think, unless they've been flying for 500 years.

4. ...there's no doubt in my mind if Mrs. Drinkwater fed (her), she'd be back every day with her brother. The parents might send them over to bring some food back. Some of my friends growing up were poor and their parents would tell them to go to birthday parties and bring them home some cake and pizza so they wouldn't have to cook dinner.

5. And it takes an obscene amount of work and effort to even get to the point of becoming a lower income pilot. Let alone what it takes to get to a high level, in the event that the Drinkwaters actually were well off. But little miss entitlebrat apparently doesn't realize that, even as an adult.

6. I posted this on the comments:
"Why do you blame a random neighbor for the lack of food in your house instead of your parents? It was their responsibility to provide for you and your brother, not Mrs. Drinkwater. Why didn't you call your father or your grandparents?
"You seem to have had quite the entitlement attitude for such a young child."
I doubt it will survive moderation, but I can't believe I'm the only one who tried to post something like that.

7. To assume the Drinkwaters had plenty of money when she says in the same article they had multiple kids of their own is stupid. No one with multiple kids and a midlevel job has plenty of money - it all goes to the kids.

8. There is much the author leaves out: how old was said Volvo (as they are pretty indestructible), were the skis brand new, what did the neighbor's wife really do for a living. Maybe the pilot made good money for a while but in light of new events, maybe both parents worked. If the kids were in school, it is likely that Mrs. D went to work again.
I have friends who are SAHMs. No one wears suits hanging around the house or running errands.
Considering mommy did not leave a note...which tells me that only one was a (not so) SAHM and it was not the neighbor. If mommy was working, then Brookie would not need a note, would she?

9. I wonder how disappointed she would have been if Mrs. Drinkwater gave her celery and carrot sticks to eat - or even a piece of fruit. If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're not hungry.

10. When we was growing up, we never had any "fun" food (Hostess, Doritos, etc) either. It just wasn't in the budget. However, If one of us had ever DARED to go begging at a neighbor's house, our mother would have beaten the shit out of us. Also, if they lived in this really affluent neighborhood I can't help but wonder why the parents didn't sell the house and buy a cheaper one, thus freeing up some money for groceries?

11. I can relate to the writer's experience in that my dad was always broke but clung to the delusion of being upper middle class. As a result we lived in rented homes in nice neighborhoods with the shitty furniture and electricity being turned off from time to time. It was super important to dad that my sister and I went to "good" public schools. Looking back I wish he would have been honest with himself and chosen to live in a working class community we could afford because going to the "good" school really sucks when don't fit in because of your cheap clothes and are too embarassed to have anyone see the inside of your house.
That said, it never once occurred to me to go beg a neighbor for food. I would have been mortified. I agree with others here being puzzled over why the writer is angry at some neighbor she barely knew and not her parents who clearly made stupid choices.

12. She also says that she was 8 or 9 but in middle school. Middle school kyds are older than that. So was she undecided as to whether such a young child or a hardworking middle school student in charge of a younger sibling with no food or the house was the most pitiful story? And just went with both?

13. There was much hunger in my childhood, but I can assure you we never in a million years would have begged from the neighbors. My parents were on drugs and I remember times when all we had in the fridge were packets of ketchup. Begging at the neighbors?? Never.

14. Wait a second--she includes a picture of herself. That is not a starving child. She looks fine. Not even particularly skinny, as we were. We had plenty of food and a very nice middle class upbringing but dad had heart disease so mom cooked boring heart healthy food. We just ate tasteless food to stay alive. I am grateful to mom for doing this. I love good food but on a day to day basis I eat the same type of food so I won't blow up like a balloon.

Yeah Lenona. Every comment was on how 'brave' she was. Bullshit. They had food at the house. She says so. Just that she didn't know how to cook it. Did this inspire her to learn how to cook cheap healthy food? From what I read it didn't look like it. Whatever. She is as brave as that congress critter who 'bravely sent a message to qanon' by sitting outside on a nice day while surrounded by the national guard.

But the article did remind me about that joke about women in my generation.

What do you see when you look at your kitchen?
Women: A prison with chains in every corner just waiting to drag you down to the very pits of hell!!!!
Men: I guess I'm a bit hungry. Maybe I should try an apple chutney sauce on the porkchops.

Obviously, the movie "Hidden Figures" needs to be redone. I'm sure these ballpark figures and 2 + 2 = 5 nonsense would have gone over well and those astronauts would have turn out just fine. And when you're calculating your account balance, I'm sure your bank will concur with your creative approach to basic addition and subtraction.

"I identify as a billionaire, bigot!"

I have my own issues with the way math is taught, but at least I recognize that an answer is either right or wrong.

My objection to math is the insistence on teaching it past the point of usefulness. Most of us will never need anything beyond geometry, so we can calculate square footage on rooms and property and the like. I do not need algebra, elementary functions or calculus and I resented having to learn it.

I do not need algebra, elementary functions or calculus and I resented having to learn it. ~ Patrick at March 7, 2021 2:51 PM

I'd argue that learning elementary algebra has some non-academic application, even if not applied directly as algebra. It teaches problem solving with unknown variables.

On the meter:

The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. In 1799, it was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was changed in 1889). The International Prototype Metre remained the standard until 1960, when the eleventh CGPM defined the metre in the new International System of Units (SI) as equal to 1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum.
To further reduce uncertainty, the 17th CGPM in 1983 replaced the definition of the metre with its current definition, thus fixing the length of the metre in terms of the second and the speed of light:
The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 second.
This definition fixed the speed of light in vacuum at exactly 299792458 metres per second (≈300000 km/s). An intended by-product of the 17th CGPM's definition was that it enabled scientists to compare lasers accurately using frequency, resulting in wavelengths with one-fifth the uncertainty involved in the direct comparison of wavelengths, because interferometer errors were eliminated. To further facilitate reproducibility from lab to lab, the 17th CGPM also made the iodine-stabilised helium–neon laser "a recommended radiation" for realising the metre. For the purpose of delineating the metre, the BIPM currently considers the HeNe laser wavelength, λHeNe, to be 632.99121258 nm with an estimated relative standard uncertainty (U) of 2.1×10−11. This uncertainty is currently one limiting factor in laboratory realisations of the metre, and it is several orders of magnitude poorer than that of the second, based upon the caesium fountain atomic clock (U = 5×10−16). Consequently, a realisation of the metre is usually delineated (not defined) today in labs as 1579800.762042(33) wavelengths of helium-neon laser light in a vacuum, the error stated being only that of frequency determination.

Oh, yeah - that "second" mentioned above? It's the interval described by 9192631770 oscillations of the Cs-133 atom between two hyperfine ground states.

This might serve to show just how far the worthless snowflake is from actually knowing anything of value; it's their silent futility that makes them claim math is racist. The real world doesn't care what color you are, how "woke" you are or about any of your feelings.

And it doesn't work for smaller base numbers, even if you use modular arithmetic

4 mod 3 = 1 5 mod 3 = 2
4 mod 2 = 0 5 mod 2 = 1

You'd have to be using different bases.

As for who uses different based numbers, some civilizations used a base 60, others a base 20. The reason the counting French French is different from Swiss or Belgian French is because of this. The Celts used a base 20, So you get numbers like soixante dix (sixty ten) or quatre-vingts (four twenties) but then the Belgians and Swiss were influenced by the later Germanic migrations who used a base ten, so you get septante (seventy) and huitante/octante (eighty)

Base 10 is not universal, though it could be argued 20 and 60 are multiples of 10. 20 could be from fingers + toes.

Actually, Ben, it says she's a restaurant professional and hospitality consultant, so chances are she knows plenty by now about cooking, nutrition, budgeting, sanitation, proper organization, etc. She just didn't apparently think HER neglectful parents had any ability/obligation to develop those skills, since they likely never did.

Much in the same way that her parents apparently didn't teach her that she had no automatic right to eat soon AFTER she's had lunch - let alone bother the neighbors. Kids don't realize that it's good to be hungry before your next meal. Of course, if the school lunches really were too small (she didn't say), she should still have asked her PARENTS for extra food.

(Btw, the Frugal Zealot, Amy Dacyczyn, once pointed out that even healthful cold cereal is one of the first things that should be dropped from the family budget when money is tight - it's just too pricey.)

More comments:

15. Most kids eat lunch at school around 12pm. She probably got home around 3pm. So in that short period of time, she became so famished that she needed to beg?

16. I'm truly tired of people whining about "hungry" in America. Who gives a ---- about "hungry?" Kids have a hollow leg most of the times and are always hungry no matter how much they have to eat anyway. Everyone has been hungry at some point.

17. she SAYS "All I knew was that we needed a snack".
No one "needs" a SNACK. (except diabetics)
I'm with the people who think the parents didn't keep junk-food in the house and the kids would go around acting like that was some kind of torture. They probably saw what the other kids at school have in their lunches (twinkles, doritos, etc.), and hatched this clever plan to go around begging the neighbors for their "extra" junk food. It's entirely possible that the parents of these brats went around to the neighbors and said "If my kid ever asks you for something to eat, don't give them anything. We don't allow our kids to eat between meals because it ruins their appetites." OF COURSE Mrs. Drinkwater is going to be giving you the stink-eye if you keep coming around with stories about how you're "starving".
Either that, or she doesn't want to end up feeding you nuts or some shit you're allergic to and getting sued for it.

"Actually, Ben, it says she's a restaurant professional and hospitality consultant, so chances are she knows plenty by now about cooking, nutrition, budgeting, sanitation, proper organization, etc." ~Lenona

Couldn't disagree more. She didn't say chef. She didn't say cook. She said consultant. She knows how to flip through a catalog and hire someone else to cook. Most likely she can't make cup noodles.

So did Mrs Drinkwater talk to the mom? What happened?

The author, Brooke, didn't say - but I inferred that even if Mrs. Drinkwater only talked to the mother, that didn't stop the other neighbors from overhearing the parents' loud financial arguments that Brooke referred to. That would explain the looks she got.

And Ben, I understood that she didn't become a cook. But even waiters have to learn to anticipate and discuss, occasionally, nutritional info (even when it's printed on the menu) with customers - such as calorie count, carbs, sugar, caffeine, meat content, etc. So I think it's fair to assume she's gained at least a surface understanding of why the skills I listed are important.

(Though she clearly didn't learn, even as a hospitality consultant, that while it's good to be neighborly, it's even better to GIVE before you ask for help. Not to mention that adults have every right to be skeptical of kids' veracity. Kids exaggerate all the time - and Brooke didn't even claim she had to skip meals.)

Facts not in evidence Lenona. You are making things up. There is no evidence she knows how to boil water much less cook anything more complicated than a PBnJ.

For god sake read the bio she provides!

http://www.foodwoolf.com/about-brooke-burton

Brooke Burton-Luttmann likes to eat. That is well covered. But nowhere does she talk about cooking anything herself. She writes restaurant reviews. She runs a catering business. She blogs. Given her age and geographic location I'd bet you $100 she doesn't know the difference between a paring knife and a butchers knife much less when and how they should be used.

Please read this again:

"So I think it's fair to assume she's gained at least a surface understanding of why the skills I listed are important."

In other words, maybe she doesn't know enough to be a good cook, but she likely knows by now that cooking from scratch is often far cheaper than not doing so. That's just one reason why cooking is an important skill.

I'm no pro at cooking, but I know how to cook nutritiously for well under $100 a month - and no, I'm not vegan. One tip: waste nothing.

It isn't fair to assume Lenona. This is you engaging in wishful thinking. The woman is part of my generation. Given the factors I pointed out there is an +80% likelihood she can't cook at all or can barely cook (i.e. sandwiches).

Look, I'm not saying your reasons for learning how to cook are wrong. But women refusing to learn for really stupid reasons is a major shibboleth for upper class millenials. It may be stupid but it is also real.

For millenials and their kids a kitchen is a man's place and women should only enter with his permission.

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