They're at it again

The school just sent a letter home with a booklet of vocabulary words ... from the math program.  It contains things like "number sentence".

You'd immediately recognize what they call a "number sentence".  It looks like, for example, "2 + 3 = 5".

There's a perfectly good word for that already.  We call it an equation.  What asshat thought it was a good idea to go muddying the water by making up inaccurate terms like "number sentence"?  (The previous iteration was "number fact".)

Precision and accuracy are important in mathematics.  There are reasons why we use terms whose meanings are precisely defined.  Equations — or mathematical statements in general — have different structure and obey different rules than sentences, and different sets of operations can be performed upon them.  Calling them sentences confuses the issue to no purpose.

Instead of kludging together some artificial term that vaguely approximates what something is, why not just teach the correct word and its meaning in the first place?  We don't teach children to talk about "milkable dogs" when we mean a cow, so why are we making up crap like "number sentence"?  Talking about a number sentence is like talking about a feathered cat.  If it has feathers, it isn't a cat, it's a bird; and if it's made up of constants, variables, and mathematical operators, it's not a sentence, it's an equation.  (Or an inequality, or an identity, or one of several other kinds of mathematical statement.)

And we wonder why our schools are failing.

SNOOOOOOOOOOO

It hath snown.  First snow of the winter.  The Dread Pirate Bignum gets credit for the first snowball thrown.  (Granted it wasn't a very good snowball; this is powder.  But it's the thought that counts.)

"Mawwidge...."

Our marriage is between myself and cymrullewes.  It is neither dependent upon, nor could it be harmed by, anyone else's marriage, and is no business of either state or church.  I don't care if Fred Phelps wants to marry Elton John¹, so long as if they're serious about it, their marriage is given as much respect as anyone else's.

Our marriage cannot possibly be strengthened in any way through being "protected" by bigots who don't even believe in their own (or they wouldn't think it needed protecting).

[1]  Yes, you may now do the brain-explody thing.