Thursday, May 17, 2012

Math was invented by a man

In an effort to finally finish my zillion math classes in order to get my Associates degree, I'm taking summer classes (for the first time in my life).  I gotta say - it's not too bad.  I'm only doing two classes, so I still get fun weekends with my family.  And it's great that there are only four students who are in my math class (8 are registered, but for the first two weeks, only 4 or 5 have shown up).  Which means that the instructor (really nice guy even if he is a total math nerd) has plenty of time to ask me why I look so confused.

As part of the math course requirement, I have to do the weekly class time as well as 90 minutes in the Hub (tutoring center) every week.  After class last night, I headed over to the Hub.  I was working on homework and at one point had my teacher as well as one of the tutors trying to explain this ONE problem to me.  The tutor (a student my age who LOVES math and is really good at it) was trying to explain the problem to me and the teacher walked by.  He really is nice - he came over and explained in "math language" how to do the problem.  I'm sure he thought he was dumbing the problem down for me, but it just wasn't enough.  He said, "Make sense?" and walked away.

The tutor saw my face and started laughing.  He mockingly said, "You got it, right?"  I was like, "Oh yeah, no problem."  Then tutor-whose-name-I-don't-know said, "All right, let's start over and I'll try explaining this again."  He walked me through the equation yet again and at the end asked, "Do you understand better now?"

Uh - NO!

I told him, "I understand HOW you're getting the answer.  As in, I know the steps to follow to get the answer.  But I don't understand the logic behind it.  What I don't get is that you're essentially telling me that one plus one equals one!!"

He laughed, "Yeah, in this case it does. Confusing, right?"

OH MY GOSH YES!!
Seriously...what the WHAT?!

I let him know that a man must have invented math because it's so confusing and makes things a lot harder than they are.  Luckily Tutor has a sense of humor and laughed about it.

But I didn't hear him deny that math sucks!  ;)


P.S. If I'm a little MIA from the blog this next couple of months, I swear I have a good reason (or ten).  Besides school (oh, and P.S., I found out that for my online class, I have to take 12 quizzes A WEEK for the next 14 weeks!!), I'm trying to pack since our house is currently under contract and we have to be out by June 14th, and we also have my family reunion June 8-10, AND I still have three kiddos who, for some reason, like to eat and wear clean clothes.  (Alright, they wouldn't care if their clothes were dirty - that one is all me.)

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