Who Writes These Anyway?

So today in math class I realized something.

Every single story problem in my math book is stupid. 

No wonder kids are failing math. Seriously.

#34. Little Billy is standing in a forest. There's a tree next to him. Billy's shadow is 3 feet long. Billy is 4 feet tall. The Tree's shadow is 13 feet long. The Tree is how many feet tall?

Alright, so first off. Why the hell is Little Billy in the forest? By himself nonetheless. I'm going to call Child Services on Billy's mother. She's doing a terrible job. Does she even know what lives in the forest? Bears, and mushrooms, and weasels, and clowns. Rabid clowns that devour children's souls. Billy is in grave danger. What if the tree decided that it wanted nobody to be around to hear it fall so it fell on Billy, killing him instantly. Or perhaps not so instantly, and Billy lay there for hours in agonizing pain wishing he had not been so curious as to how tall that tree really was.

Alright, so perhaps that wasn't such a good reason why the problem is stupid. Okay, yeah. Really- it's a fantastic reason. Nobody gives a damn about Little Billy and a tree. It's boring and pointless. Nobody walks into a forest randomly and stands next to a tree and wants to know how tall that tree is.
Another thing- how does Billy know how long the tree's shadow is? HM? If he's so good at telling how long shadows are, why can't he just tell how tall the damn tree is? 

Now if the problem was written like this it would be more captivating:

#34. Little Billy had nearly escaped his drunken hillbilly mother in an attempt to gain his freedom. As he ran from the trailer park at a speed of 3 feet per second, his drunken mother chased after him in a rage. Her speed was 5 feet per second due to slightly longer legs. There was a random pine tree ahead and Billy decided he was going to have to climb it in order to escape his toothless mother. Billy calculated the tree's shadow by counting the seconds he ran as he went across the shadow. He ran for 6 seconds. Therefore the the tree's shadow was 18 feet long. As Billy attempted to calculate the height of the tree his mother caught him and clobbered him to death. Calculate the number of years Billy's mom will be in the prison system.

See? Isn't that way more fun? As much as I love trees, I don't fucking care how tall they are.

Another thing I never understood:
Teachers and even professors do this. When they are about to talk about a useless subject nobody cares about, they always try to draw the class in:

"Well I bet you've all wondered as you stare at your drinking glass, how much work it'd take to pump all the water out of it."
Actually, no, no I don't. I look at that glass and go, "Damn that looks refreshing." and I drink it. I don't ask myself about how much work it'd take to pump my orange juice onto the table. Why would anybody in their right mind do that? Nobody does that Peterson. Nobody.

"How many times have you been enjoying your lunch when you think to yourself, I wonder what chemicals make up this soda pop!?" 
None, never have I thought that. Sometimes I think "I'm slowly killing myself by drinking this...oh well." or I don't even think at all because the reason I'm drinking it is because it's so late but I have a midterm tomorrow and I have to study and this can is chock full of caffeine. But no, Walker, I don't care what chemicals make up my soda pop, all I care about is how to get it from the can, into mah belleh. 

Never will I understand how they expect people to become direly interested when they provide the most ridiculous scenarios for people to relate to.