“Mr. Smith fed his horse 4 qt. of oats three times a day. At 80 cents a bushel how much were the oats worth in a month of 30 days?”
This quote comes from a textbook I bought at a garage sale a few years ago. I have a small collection of old school texts. Some of them were my mother’s who taught grade school in the early 1940’s and then again in the 1960’s.
I have some of the original paper and hardcover Dick and Jane books from the 1950’s along with The Little White House from the 40’s, the Elson-Gray Basic Readers and Down the River Road from the 30’s, and some others.
The quote above comes from Hamilton’s Essentials of Arithmetic—Middle Grades and, as you might guess, it was published in the 1920’s (1927 to be exact). Of course, a Math textbook today for 5th and 6th graders would never have a word problem about how much oats a horse ate. In the first place, many kids today would not be sure what oats is (maybe they would know it had to do with Cheerios). They certainly would not understand why anybody would care or find it mildly interesting to determine how much a horse ate.
In 1927 it was a different story. A huge percentage of kids lived on farms and even those who lived in cities still depended on horses for almost all of their transportation needs outside of walking. The major nouns in the problem would have meaning: horse, oats, bushel. And, finding out how much your horse ate would be important.
Here are a few more problems that are almost quaint by our standards in 2010:
“A dealer buys 150 bales of hay, averaging 90 lb. to the bale. How many tons and pounds over does he buy?”
“Arthur’s pig when bought it weighed 73.4 lb. and cost $12. The cost of feeding was 10 cents for each pound gained. What was the total profit when the live pig sold at 15 cents a pound?”
“A girl in Idaho canned 532 qt. of vegetables at a cost of $313.56. Find the profit per bushel; the selling price per bushel.”
“How much will it cost to telegraph to the same place a night letter of 50 words, if the night rate for 50 words is the same as the day rate for 10 words?”
When I read see these problems, I visualize ten and eleven year-olds in knickerbockers and proper dresses squirming in their bolted down desks—those old ones with the ink wells. All the while, the coal stove is throwing out excess heat on a late November morning. It’s shocking to realize that those kids would now be 93 years old.
Most all of those students are gone and many of our kids wouldn’t know a telegraph pole or a bushel basket if they ran into one. However, even though the examples in the word problems have changed, my friends in Tech’s Math Department would be quick to point out that the concepts of the arithmetic and math in the text are timeless and eternal.
Beyond those concepts, we also know that the kids haven’t changed either. We know that today some kids still hate Math with a passion and would rather do almost anything than open their Math book and do the homework. I also know that at least one of the students who used Hamilton’s Essentials of Arithmetic in 1927 felt the same way
On the top page edge, written in bold, capital pencil letters is the word:
"P O I S O N."
