Elton Camp Poet Rhyme

The Mathematics Plague

The Mathematics Plague

By Elton Camp

It’s a fact of modern life we must face
Mathematics holds an important place

Arithmetic, basic algebra, geometry too
All are important skills for me and you

Of the people, only a tiny percent require
Advanced algebra, trig, calculus or higher

An educational development to abhor
Is to require all to take more and more

So much of it is of virtually no worth
To ninety-nine percent of folks on earth

Quadratic equations I’ve never had to solve
Nothing ever have those inequities involved

So far, I’ve gotten along in life just fine
Without using tangent, secant or cosine

Nor has it, even once, been of value to know
How fast, to overtake a car, I’d have to go

But we are making school increasingly tough
By continuing to teach our kids such stuff

It’s high time somebody cried out, “Enough!”
And childhood slavery to higher math rebuff

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Ilene Bauer October 22, 2013 at 5:33 PM i still shudder when i think of trying to master those awful word problems. i agree with you! Elton Camp October 22, 2013 at 8:07 PM One of the characters in the comic strip Peanuts said that only in math word problems could someone buy sixty melons and not be thought to be crazy. I especially disliked the ones about two people diving toward each other at different speeds and I was supposed to determine where they would meet. Foolishness. Elton