Florida Governor Ron DeSantis claimed Friday that he has the “math wake-up” number, and he doesn’t like it.
The Republican criticized the mysterious (and non-existent) form of mathematics in a speech in Tampa before the conservative group Moms for Liberty, which opposes various aspects of public education.
DeSantis couldn’t figure out exactly what “awake math” is. He suggested that they are mathematics with little regard for correct calculations.
“I’m thinking to myself, like, 2 plus 2 equals 4. It’s not 2 plus 2 equals: Well, how do you feel about that? Is that an injustice? He explained.”
“No. We have to teach children to get the right answer.”
He bragged that Florida sent “wake math” textbooks to publishers. “They woke up and sent us regular math books,” DeSantis said.
That was a head scratcher, even for DeSantis.
Earlier this year, the Florida Department of Education sent thousands of textbooks, most of them for students in kindergarten through fourth grade, back to publishers. But in the case of math textbooks, it wasn’t because the lessons took a “whatever” approach to calculations, as DeSantis claimed.
The Department of Education released images to the press in April showing just four pages of supposedly “awake mathematics” in the returned textbooks. One, for example, featured a bar graph showing that people over 65 and political conservatives tend to express more racial bias.
The move was part of ongoing conservative efforts in Florida to restrict any teaching in schools about racism or LGBTQ issues, the latter through its new “Don’t Say Gay” law.
One of hundreds of Floridians who reviewed school textbooks in the state earlier this year flatly told the Department of Education that its restrictions were simply “irrelevant to a math textbook,” The Washington Post reported.
Twitter critics of DeSantis’s nonsensical “wake up math” tirade think someone needs a better education.
