OPINION: Next up for cancellation: high school algebra, geometry, trigonometry

The cultural shift to the political right will have foreseeable consequences, but banning of controversial books such as “Huckleberry Finn,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Catcher in the Rye,” and “The Grapes of Wrath” is inevitable because they make students uncomfortable.

 In my opinion, the easily offended censors are banning works in the wrong subject. My career as a math teacher taught me that the real horrifying subjects that cause sleepless nights in high school students: math, especially algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.

Let’s start with the principal boogeyman of ninth graders everywhere: algebra. I mean, c’mon does anyone really care what x is? I asked 100 random people about their experiences in high school algebra and every one of them told me that they never used algebra at any time in their daily lives. Not once.

The ultra conservatives claimed that the commutative property taught in algebra is perilously close to communism and its cousin the distributive property is obviously an ideological euphemism for the redistribution of wealth. Critics of the mathematics curriculum point out that the books used in algebra refer to imaginary and irrational numbers like pi.

Don’t get me started on fractions.

The Bible never uses the word fractions in either testament so why should students have to learn them? In recent years, some critics have questioned the math curriculum. Professor emeritus Andrew Hacker of CUNY has openly stated that high school students should not have to learn algebra. Hacker argues that algebra is the primary impediment to education and that banning it will increase graduation rates.

As bad as algebra is, most students hate geometry even more vehemently. Plane geometry teaches heresies about the earth being round when the Bible clearly refers to the four corners of the earth. In I Kings tells us that the circumference of a circle is three times the diameter, but geometry argues that the ratio is pi or about 3.14. I guess three is close enough for Biblical work. Like most right-thinking Americans, the only time I need trigonometry is to find the trigger on my AR 15 or AK 47.

As long as we are banning books that foster student discomfort, let’s add science books to the list. Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense and one-time commentator on Fox news, once bragged that he had not washed his hands in ten years: germs are not real because he cannot see them.

A cursory internet search found a wide variety of websites that encourage teaching math from a Christian perspective. We Kentuckians are lucky because we can learn all the science we need by going to the Creation Museum and Noah’s Ark Park. Movies such as Jurassic Park perpetuate falsehoods that Tyrannosaurus rex are predators, not herbivores. I have seen every episode of The Flintstones and I have never seen any human being killed and eaten by the dinosaurs cavemen used for everyday life.

The so-called fossils of dinosaurs were planted by Satan to confuse weak-minded people about timeline of creation. We can use mathematics to estimate the age of the earth using Biblical verses. God created man on the sixth day so the rest of creation took the other five days. Using Genesis 5 and 11, Abraham lived about 2000 BC, or about 4000 years ago. Jesus lived about 2000 years ago so the earth is only about 6000 years old plus the first 5 days.

I did all of those calculations without using algebra, geometry, or trigonometry.

Figures don’t lie, but liars figure. We must nip the godlessness of high school math classes by drawing a line in the sand to prevent algebra, geometry and trigonometry from torturing young impressionable minds of our precious youth.


By: Roger Guffey, a retired math teacher in Lexington.