"Mark McGwire's record setting 62nd home run traveled 341 feet." Where would you probably find this statement? On The Crimson's sports pages? In The Guinness Book of Records? How about in a problem set for a Science-A Core class?

Most students would agree that associating physics with baseball is an easy way to make learning a bit more fun. But harmless as this may seem, these cultural references discriminate. McGwire and baseball are not a part of everybody's life. In fact, there are students who have never heard of McGwire or a home run. They are called "first-year international students."

International students are as familiar with Mark McGwire as American students are with Ronaldo. They know as much about home runs as American students do about corner kicks. Yet in these problem sets, baseball is chosen over soccer. Though this decision may help some students, it also puts others at a disadvantage.

While I have no complaints about baseball, I do have a complaint against baseball as a recurrent theme in problem sets. Consider one such question: "The pitch was described as a low fastball so for simplicity assume that it was hit off the ground and returned to the ground 341 feet away." What was 341 feet away? The hit? The pitch? The home run?

Fortunately, my roommate from New York was around to help me decipher the mystery of pitches, hits, low fastballs, line drives and home runs. But I would have understood the problem more quickly had baseball not been involved.

An ideal problem should be solvable in itself, requiring only a minimal background. Solving a problem about a home runs is difficult if one cannot picture a home run in the first place. It requires a familiarity with the game of baseball-- in other words, an American cultural background.

Requiring a cultural background as part of the minimal background introduces a cultural bias. Granted, this cultural bias is merely a perverse effect of an otherwise well-intended effort to make problems easier to understand, and this is not to say that professors shouldn't continue these efforts.

But they should also remember that a minimal background should not be biased towards one culture or another. Baseball is not the only thing on Earth that obeys the laws of gravity.