Militarized Math Problems For 8th Graders: Is This Acceptable In Democratic Classrooms?
The kitchen table was still sticky with spaghetti sauce last month when my 13-year-old Lila pushed her math homework across at me, the edge of the worksheet crumpled where she’d been twisting it. “Can you check this? Also, is it just me, or is this messed up?” I wiped my hand on my jeans and leaned in. The problem read: “A military drone strike eliminates 12 enemy combatants. If 35% of the remaining combatants retreat, and 104 stay to fight, how many total enemy combatants were present before the strike?”
I blinked. I don’t remember 8th grade math word problems being like that when I was in school. I flipped through the rest of the worksheet and found two more: one asking to calculate the maximum effective range of a new sniper rifle, given bullet drop and muzzle velocity, another asking for the ratio of infantry to armored vehicles in a planned troop deployment. Lila shrugged and said, “We had one on Monday about how many bombs fit in a B-52 bomber. My friend Jake said that’s cool, but it just makes me weirded out.”
I texted Lila’s math teacher that night, not to complain, just to ask where the worksheets came from. She wrote back 20 minutes later, explaining the district adopted a new set of “career-connected real world math” modules last year, put together by an education nonprofit that gets most of its funding from a major defense contractor. She said most teachers just use them as-is because they’re aligned to the state test, and no one had said anything about the context before.
I posted a quick question in our parent Facebook group to see if anyone else had noticed the pattern. The responses split pretty evenly down the middle. Half said it was just math, the numbers are the same no matter what story you wrap around them, and kids need to grow up and see the world as it is anyway. One dad whose son is active in JROTC said his kid gets extra excited to do the problems because he wants to enlist after high school, so it’s a good hook that gets him engaged. The other half were as thrown off as I was. One mom, Maria, whose brother was killed by a drone strike in Afghanistan 10 years ago, commented back saying her 8th grader had a panic attack after that exact drone problem came up in class, and she hadn’t said anything because she didn’t want to be “that parent” disrupting everyone’s routine.
That conversation got me thinking about what this actually means, beyond whether a problem is offensive or not. We live in a democratic country, where public education is supposed to teach kids to think critically, not just plug numbers into equations. When you turn a drone strike that kills real people into a neutral word problem, what are you actually teaching beyond percentages? You’re teaching that killing is a routine, uncomplicated thing that exists only to be calculated. There’s no mention of who those people are, if any civilians are nearby, what the strike is even for. It’s just a set of numbers. Violence becomes background noise, not something that needs to be questioned. That’s not the kind of quiet lesson we should be teaching kids in a democracy, where they’ll one day get to vote on whether we go to war, or how our military is used.
The most common pushback I hear is that these are “real world problems,” so they’re better than abstract ones. That’s fair, real world context does make math more engaging for most kids. But why does it have to be military? There are a hundred real world contexts that are actually relevant to 8th graders’ lives. How much do you need to save each month to buy a new gaming console? How many cans of paint do you need to repaint the student lounge? How many meals can the local food bank pack with the $2,000 our school raised last month? All of those have numbers, all of them teach the same math skill, and none of them normalize war as a routine part of daily life.
The good news is you don’t have to launch a full school board revolt to make this better for your kid, and teachers don’t have to quit their jobs to fix it. It’s the small swaps that make the biggest difference, and they take almost no time. If you’re a parent going through homework with your kid, the second you see a militarized context, just cross it out and rewrite it together. It takes 10 seconds. That drone problem we had? We just changed it to “A bakery bakes 12 chocolate chip cookies before opening. If 35% of the remaining cookies are sold by lunch, and 104 are left for the afternoon, how many total cookies did the bakery bake?” The math is exactly the same. Lila still got practice with percentages, and we didn’t have to process the weight of drone strikes over homework if we didn’t want to.
If you’re a teacher stuck using a curriculum you didn’t choose, you can do the same thing up front. Before you pass out the worksheets, just cross out the military context on the whiteboard and write a new one. It adds 30 seconds to your warm-up, and you don’t have to fight administration to change the whole curriculum to make a difference for kids like Maria’s son. When we brought this up at our PTA meeting, three local 8th grade math teachers said they’d already started doing that, and no one has seen any drop in test practice or engagement.
For people who want bigger change, the first step is just to count how often these problems come up and share that list with your school board. Most districts don’t even read the word problems in the curriculum packs they buy from outside vendors; they just check that the math aligns to state standards and move on. When we showed our school board 17 militarized word problems in one 8th grade math module, they were surprised, and added a review of all curriculum content for harmful context to next year’s agenda.
It’s not a perfect fix. The review will take a full year, there are still plenty of old worksheets in circulation, and there are still plenty of people who don’t see what the big deal is. Last week, Lila brought home a worksheet with a new problem: it asked to calculate how many tree saplings the local conservation group can plant with their $1,800 annual budget. She grinned and pointed at it, said “Ms. Henderson changed it. See?” It’s a small change, and it doesn’t fix all the other ways militarism creeps into public education, but it’s something. For now, that’s enough.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Militarized Math Problems For 8th Graders: Is This Acceptable In Democratic Classrooms