I wonder about a math problem I saw last school year in the computerized lessons. There was a little story about shooting a rocket from the top of a tower. Then an equation was given and the student was told to use the formula to figure out how long the rocket was in the air before hitting the ground.
The formula was written using x and y variables rather than some more mnemonic letters like t and h. There was nothing in the lesson about how the a.b.c parameters were chosen; nothing about how c represents the height of the tower, for example. (There was a hint from the teacher that "hitting the ground" was the same as zero height, h=y=0. Nothing about how t=x=0 gives the height just before blast off.)
I am wondering what the purpose of the lesson was. The students are not synthesizing an equation; it is handed to them. The student is not analyzing what the equation is communicating; there is no hint of the richness of the mathematical language. The student is not asked to relate the little story about flying a rocket to the equation at all; they only need to ignore the story and with it any pretense of a connection with actual reality. I suppose we are teaching the student to ignore the pointless bulk of useless information but even then we are not offering any method for choosing which information may be useful and which is mere fluff.