Militarized Math Problems for 8th Graders: Is This Appropriate In Democratic Classrooms?
It’s 7:30 on a Tuesday night, and my 8th grader Leo is slouched at our kitchen table, crumbs of cheddar goldfish stuck to the sleeve of his hoodie, pushing his math worksheet toward me. “I get how to do the division, I just don’t get why it’s all about this,” he says. I lean in, and read the first problem out loud: “A platoon of 48 soldiers needs to cross an enemy-held river. Each boat can hold 5 soldiers. How many boats does the platoon need?” I scroll down to the next one: “A new missile system has a 72% accuracy rate. How many expected hits would you get from 150 launches?” The one after that asks students to calculate the supply route distance between three military checkpoints on a coordinate plane.
Leo shrugs. “My teacher says these are more real-world than the old pizza and cookie problems we used to get. But why does every real-world thing have to be about soldiers and blowing stuff up?”
I’d never really paid attention to the context of his word problems before that night. I texted three other parents from Leo’s class that same evening, and by bedtime I had a handful of similar stories. One mom told me her 8th grader, whose older brother is deployed with the army, had a full panic attack when a whole unit of problems was centered on planning a ground invasion, because he kept thinking his brother would be in that scenario. Another told me the refugee kid from Syria who lives down the street from her, who goes to the same middle school, refused to turn in a worksheet full of these problems last semester, and got a detention for it. He wouldn’t talk about why, but his mom said all the problems about attacking villages brought back memories of his dad, who was killed by a missile before they fled the country.
I started digging a little, and found that this isn’t just a quirk of our district’s textbook. Over the past 20 years, as more STEM curriculum has been funded by defense departments and military-backed education groups, more and more everyday math problems have shifted from civilian contexts to military ones. It’s not that all problems are like this, but enough are that kids start to notice the pattern. A lot of educators argue it’s no big deal: it’s just context, the math is the same, and it’s more engaging than boring problems about counting apples.
But that ignores how 8th graders absorb context. At that age, they’re just starting to form their own ideas about what adults do, what skills are valued, and what role they want to play in the country they live in. We live in a democracy, which means we’re supposed to be teaching kids that their skills can be used to build up their communities, hold leaders accountable, and contribute to civilian life. When the majority of “real-world” math examples are tied to the military, that sends a quiet message that the most important, useful application of math is for war and national defense, not for things like planning a community garden, calculating how much food your local shelter needs for the winter, or figuring out if your city’s new housing development is actually affordable for working families.
It doesn’t have to be intentional to be a problem. I’m not saying we need to ban any mention of the military from math class. If you’re doing a cross-curricular unit on World War II and want to do a math problem about how much supplies were sent to Allied troops, that makes sense. But random military context thrown into a random unit on division or percentages doesn’t serve any educational purpose. It just normalizes militarism as a regular part of everyday life, which isn’t something we should be doing for kids growing up in a democracy that’s supposed to prioritize civilian power.
So what do you do about it, when you’re just a parent or an overworked teacher with a set curriculum you have to follow? It doesn’t take big, dramatic changes to make a difference. The first thing I started doing is just swapping the context out loud when we do homework. When the problem says 48 soldiers crossing a river, I just say, “Let’s change this: 48 8th graders are going to the zoo. Each van holds 5 kids. How many vans do we need?” It takes 10 extra seconds, doesn’t throw off our homework flow, and it removes the triggering, unnecessary context without skipping the practice the problem is for.
If you’re a parent and you want to go a step further, you can send a quick note to your school’s curriculum committee asking them to review the context of word problems in middle school math textbooks. You don’t have to demand a full recall, just ask them to check how many problems use military context versus civilian community-focused contexts, and consider alternatives for future adoptions. If you’re a teacher, keep a running list of quick alternative contexts you can pull from: calculating how many snack bins are needed for a free lunch program, figuring out the slope of a new wheelchair ramp for the school gym, planning the route for a local charity walk. All of these are just as “real-world” as a missile problem, and they tie math to things kids can actually participate in right now.
Last month, Leo had an assignment to write his own original word problem for his class. He turned in: “Our school wants to add free snack bins in the hallway for kids who can’t afford lunch. Each bin holds 30 granola bars. 127 kids use the bin every week. How many bins do we need to buy to make sure everyone gets a snack?” When I asked him why he picked that, he said, “It’s actually a real thing we need here. Why would I write about soldiers?”
Our school still hasn’t responded to the note I sent about the textbook. Most teachers are already stretched too thin to rewrite every problem in the curriculum, and changing textbooks takes years. I don’t have a neat, absolute answer for whether this practice is acceptable, really. It’s not the biggest problem in education, but it’s one of those small, slow shifts that adds up over time. For now, swapping words at the kitchen table works for us. It’s enough to start the conversation, and that’s more than we were doing before.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Militarized Math Problems for 8th Graders: Is This Appropriate In Democratic Classrooms