I am a volunteer reader at the Princeton unit of "Learning Ally" (formerly "Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic") and I recently discovered that high school students are introduced to the concept of quantization well before they take chemistry and physics. For the past few months I have been reading onto computer files a popular Algebra I textbook, 1 and I was surprised and dismayed by how it treated simultaneous equations and quadratic equations. The coefficients are always simple integers in examples and exercises, even when they are related to physics. This is probably a good idea when these topics are first presented to the students. It makes it easy to solve simultaneous equations by the method of elimination of a variable. And it makes it easy to solve some quadratic equations by factoring. The textbook also discusses the method of substitution for linear equations and the use of the quadratic formula, but only with simple integers.