Stocker - Math that Matters

      Mathematics, in its essence, in 'neutral'.  Any instructor can change the context of most any problem without actually changing the mathematical content within.

      The author's intentions were to recruit/motivate those students who would not be ordinarily stimulated by math in its pure form.  For that purpose, Math That Matters is fantastic.  A large proportion of people who claim social studies to be their favourite subject and/or are interested in social justice and/or have difficulty understanding the why behind traditional mathematical lessons would benefit from the style of problems in this text.  The mathematically inclined, on the other hand, will be motivated to learn more math regardless of the social justice spin put on the problems.  It's not that the 'mathies' don't care about social justice, it's that they are indifferent with respect to context in acquiring their mathematical knowledge.  One potential downside to Math That Matters is that if a student who normally wasn't passionate about math embraced the SJ spin graduates to a class that removes all SJ context they may revert to their previous less-motivated selves since the topics (in their head) become interrelated.  Another negative is if a student is more interested in astronomy, atomic theory, endangered species populations, genetics, or any other non-SJ application, they might tune out if the focus it too heavy on one area of application.

      You can certainly use these elementary school style lessons as a blueprint to write similar ones for secondary school students.  There are even more possibilities with older students because of their larger (math) knowledge base, increased maturity level (more adult subject matter becomes acceptable), and greater understanding of social issues.  Most advanced (highly theoretical) math branches would be difficult to connect to SJ issues (or any other topic).  At the secondary level I would say that trigonometry would be challenging and graphing of functions or statistics would be easier to connect with SJ issues.