Susan's change purse contains quarters, dimes, and nickels. She has twice as many nickels as quarters and four more nickels than dimes. She has a total of $5.10. How many coins of each kind does Susan have in her purse?
I suffer from the mother of all math phobias. Just reading this problem causes me to hyperventilate (unlike my sister Susan who was a wizard with numbers.) It is an affliction for which I hold Eastwood at least partially responsible. My advanced math teacher in grades 9 and 12 taught to the top five percent of the class and left the rest of us to fend for ourselves. I depended entirely on intensive tutoring at exam time from my brilliant, unflappable friend Susan Bowen (now MacNeil) to get across the finish line every year.
So, this funny coincidence got me thinking about the complicated equation that prevents too many Eastwood students from accessing healthy food and from being ready to learn each morning. At first glance, it is a problem that appears much too big to solve. We know it has something to do with the growing gap in family income and a bushel of social issues found in the Eastwood community and in every community across Canada. Add the economics of food production and environmental sustainability to the mix and my head starts to spin. Yet, even a remedial student like me can see that the problem of inequality holds within it solutions to the other problems.
Too often, this conclusion leads us to give up and to abandon our efforts -- large and small -- for a better world. We have been taught that equality is a dream, the stuff of literature and poetry. Inequality is a mathematical fact, an economic reality. Why then are more equal societies like Japan and Sweden performing better by every measure than those with a wider spread between rich and poor citizens like Canada and the United States?
I've been reading The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Its authors offer convincing evidence that societies are bound to become more equal in the long run. They say that the trend toward greater equality is "almost unstoppable," running like "a river of human progress:"
"It runs from the first constitutional limits on the 'divine' (and arbitrary) right of kings, and continues on through the slow development of democracy and the establishment of the principle of equality before the law. It swells with the abolition of slavery and the extension of the franchise to include non-property-owners and women. It picks up pace with the development of free education, health services and systems of minimum income maintenance covering periods of unemployment and sickness.
It runs on to include legislation to protect the rights of employees and tenants, and legislation to prevent racial discrimination. It includes the decline of forms of class deference. The abolition of capital and corporal punishment is also part of it. So too is the growing agitation for greater equality of opportunity -- regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and religion ... all are manifestations of growing equality."
Through our work on Susan's Change Purse, we're stepping into this river with the confidence that comes from knowing it bends toward justice and its flow depends on us. We expect dams, rapids, eddies and more. But luckily, my high school friend and math tutor Susan Bowen MacNeil grew up to be a hospital nutritionist. With her help and yours too, the complicated equation at the core of Eastwood's food access issue can be reduced to a few simpler ones within our collective power to solve. Starting with the small math problem on the algebra homework help website. When you've figured it out, will you please share the answer with me?
PS: University of Toronto's Jordan Peterson talks about The Spirit Level and related issues in this 10-minute video. A time-saving alternative to reading the book. Also, we've started a Facebook fan page for Susan's Change Purse. Signal your support for this work by becoming a fan today.
