You know, Governor Bush should have expected something like this:
During a speech to high school students who mentor younger children in reading, a teenager asked the governor a basic geometry question taken from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which Bush has championed.
"Me and a couple of my friends ... we know that the FCAT is a very important part of schooling in Florida and we were wondering if you could answer one of the questions we remember from the FCAT?" said Luana Marques, 18, who just graduated from Freedom High School in Orange County and is heading to Flagler College in the fall.
The luncheon crowd at an Orlando hotel, gathered to honor 200 students who take part in the Teen Trendsetters Reading Mentor program, laughed and Marques posed the question: "What are the angles on a three-four-five-triangle?"
The governor gave a steely grin and then stalled a bit. "The angles would be ... If I was going to guess ... Three-four-five. Three-four-five. I don't know, 125, 90 and whatever remains on 180?"
Marques had an answer, although it wasn't the right one: "It's 30-60-90."
The correct answer was 90 degrees, 53.1 degrees and 36.9 degrees, said Michelle Taylor, a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Florida, when told about the governor's pop quiz...
"If the point is, I haven't been in school for the last 30 years, that's true. But if I'm going to be graduating from high school and I can't pass a 10th-grade aptitude test, then I'm fooling myself," Bush said. "The fact that a 51-year-old man can't answer a question, is really not relevant. You're still going to have to take the FCAT and you're still going to have to pass it in order to get a high school degree."
Marques thinks Governor Bush didn't have much of a sense of humor about the whole thing, and he should have, but to be fair, he could have pointed out the grammatical atrocity in her opening statement, "Me and a couple of my friends...were wondering..." And what if he had known her answer was incorrect and pointed that out to her as well? Why did she ask a question to which she mistakenly thought she knew the answer?
BestOftheWeb points out:
Now first of all, does anyone who isn't a graduate student in mathematics know the answer to this? We certainly didn't. Besides, geometry is the most useless branch of mathematics, at least in our experience. We occasionally make use of algebra, trigonometry and calculus, but we dropped our high school geometry class after a couple of months, and we've never missed it.
I certainly wouldn't argue that geometry was useless, but I wouldn't have known the answer to that item off the top of my head, either, and I aced AP Geometry in high school, and I'm younger than Governor Bush. While I may not remember the proofs, the mental discipline that came from doing them has helped me in many ways unrelated to math, and to suggest that students shouldn't learn that material just because Bush doesn't know the answer to one item off the top of his head is just plain silly.
Update: Given the discussion in my comments section, I think the theory floated by commenter Josh - that the young lady misremembered a 1-2-sqrt(3) item as a 3-4-5 item - is quite possible. According to the FCAT math item specifications, the only trigonometry tested on the 10th-grade FCAT is right-angle trigonometry (the famous SOH-CAH-TOA). It's hard to believe that the uses of inverse trig functions (necessary to solve a 3-4-5) were tested on this exam. Perhaps she misremembered a Pythagorean theorem item that used a 3-4-5 triangle.
Given that WFTV went to the trouble to contact a mathematics graduate student for the correct answer (and note that they didn't ask a Florida high school math teacher), why didn't they ask her what skills were required to solve the item, and compare those skills to the FCAT item specs listed online? Why did WFTV (and I, for that matter) miss the possibility that the student misstated the item, especially given that she gave the wrong answer for the item she posed?
Or was the point here just to have a hook on which to hang two "critics say" claims and convince the audience that the FCAT is bad because Governor Bush was stumped by one item?
Posted by kswygert at July 7, 2004 01:42 PM