How to reorganize high school math classes

I would like to offer my thoughts on reorganizing high school math. As an engineer I took many math classes during my education. After 50 years, there is no doubt that the math that serves me every day, in routine matters, is algebra, geometry and trigonometry. I think the reorganizing and combining of the different math categories could be very helpful — to put more real life in the flow of learning, than the traditional way math has been taught for years.

A quick story — I was in the back of a plane near the galley. The flight attendant was offering meal choices as “chicken or scrod.” We overheard her conversation with her colleague complaining that everyone was taking chicken and she was going to run out. We suggested asking “chicken or fish”? The scrod was now very popular. I tell this story because math could use a little marketing help also. I suggest changing the titles of the new classes to “Problem Solving Math 1 and 2.” You might roll trigonometry into it also. It would be relatively “easy” to create a curriculum for students who are inclined to math, and those that might need a bit more help. Both in name and in lessons, math needs to be relevant to students for them to apply themselves and succeed.

— Craig A Ward, Bel Air

Problematic tax increase

A increase in Maryland income taxes and modifications of the estate taxes will result in a victory in three years for Larry Hogan as governor. It’s a shame that the Maryland Legislature, and the governor, squandered the surplus Gov. Hogan left for the state taxpayers.

— Jerry Aben, Royal Oak

$5000 stimulus check proposed

Headlines everywhere as Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump dangle such treats before the American taxpayers like bones in front of puppies. To those taxpayers in a $30K or $40K or $50K bracket, this may sound enticing. To the $200K bracket and up, not so much. Mr. Musk touts these stimulus checks as being the results of savings. To most of us, as George H.W. Bush stated before he was offered the VP office by Reagan and became a public, if not private, believer in “trickle-down economics,” this is voodoo economics. If I were to save $200 on a $1000 cell phone, does that put another $200 in my checking account? Does that pay off my credit card debt? It could help if I pay $200 towards that credit card debt. But that is not what our president and his co-president, Mr. Musk, propose.

What Mr. Musk is suggesting would add another $765,000,000,000, which is the result of $5,000 (dollar amount of promised stimulus checks) multiplied by 153.8 million (number of individual taxpayers) to the national debt by handing out tiny bribes (tiny to the richest man in the world) to all individual American taxpayers. So to continue with the analogy of personal finances, instead of paying down my credit card debt with the $200 savings on the cell phone purchase, I use the credit card to donate $200 to my favorite charity, putting me deeper in debt.

And that, my fellow Americans, is voodoo economics.

— Norma Calabro, Elkton

RENEW Act is good for Maryland

Readers deserve to be told what Reps. Buckel and Pippy mean by the Democrats’ ‘frivolous global warming lawsuits’ (“Democrats don’t have answers for Maryland’s energy crisis”). The proposed RENEW (Responding to Emergency Needs from Extreme Weather) Act addresses the steadily increasing damage from fossil fuel-caused floods (remember Ellicott City?), fires and intolerable heat.

Insurance companies are becoming reluctant to insure houses in vulnerable areas, and those areas keep increasing. Who should pay for ameliorating the damage? The RENEW act says some payment should come from the greatest polluters, the fossil fuel companies that caused the crisis and then lied about it for decades. No, say Reps. Buckel and Pippy, over their dead bodies, never, not a cent: Their voters should pay for it all with their taxes. Nowhere in their commentary do they address the facts of an increasingly warming earth. They live in a fantasy world where none of this is happening: that is what is truly ‘reckless,’ which is what they call the Democrats’ prudent planning for our children’s future. But then, this administration is pushing to make it impossible even to mention the climate emergency: And after all, if we stop people talking about it, it won’t exist, right?

— David Norbrook, Baltimore