This short paper is designed to serve as a kind of primer for professors interested in thinking through ways to build a rural dimension into mathematics education courses in the interest of squarely addressing the vision and mission of ACCLAIM. Few words, therefore, will be deployed in the interest of establishing an intellectual warrant for the assumptions and assertions embedded in these pages. In fact, all that will be said in this regard is that 1) the ascendancy of what is loosely referred to as "constructivist learning theory" over the past decade clearly elevates the role of context in the development of human understanding. In other words, if professors want students (pre-school through doctoral level) to achieve at high levels, the insertion of context is currently seen as critical by the great majority of the world's cognition theorists. And, 2) whether or not one views mathematics (or any other school subject) as value-neutral, the sum total of a K-12 school experience still serves as enculturation into a larger society. In that society, former students will play, minimally, a political and an economic role, regardless of whether they ever take a job or cast a vote.