in this case, I&#x27;m specifically referencing circumstances where they&#x27;ve tried to write problems based on &quot;everyday experience&quot; -- not trains passing halfway through Kansas, but perhaps things like going to a shopping mall or a museum.  Things that you think &quot;that&#x27;s just an ordinary part of childhood&quot; until you spend some time in an area where a lot of the kids have <i>never been to the mall</i>, and the only museum they&#x27;ve ever seen was on a school field trip.  Perhaps they don&#x27;t know the term &quot;supermarket&quot; but they know what a &quot;mercado&quot; is, and they might expect very different products to be on sale from what the textbook author expected.<p>The idea of &quot;cultural competence&quot; is about figuring out how to eliminate unnecessary cultural barriers -- to make sure that a kid trying to solve this type of word problem is working through the problem, and not getting sidetracked by the fact that they don&#x27;t have the context to make sense of what it&#x27;s even about.