Rip mathematics education

Moebius Strippe — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 06:00:00 +0000

My computer is fixed! And it was shipped by ground, on August 23, by a service that guarantees delivery within four business days.”Yeah.”Purolator, at my request, has placed a trace on the damned thing, and they assure me that they’re doing their best to resolve this as efficiently as possible. This being the company that puts people on hold for half an hour at a stretch, you can imagine that I am positively FILLED WITH HOPE AND OPTIMISM.”Yes, I would waste my supernatural powers on this”" Meta-Meta, Queen of Sciences, Know Thyself.”Declan at Crawl Across the Ocean tags me for a “intellectually worthless but fun meme”: Choose your super hero name and what your powers would be. Declan’s reason for choosing me is that “a mathematical superhero would be interesting”. Alas, *dramatic sigh* this restricts me to math-related superheroes, which are doomed to be less interesting than Declan’s Analogizer and guy-who-makes-things-literal – that’s my excuse for providing this anecdotal evidence that mathematicians are boring.”You see, this meme comes at a very convenient time, because for the last week or two I’ve had a math-related superpower in mind, based on a conversation I had with Meep over the phone the other week:” Me: (rants at length about how the high school graduate I’m tutoring seems to have learned nothing in the dozen math classes he’s taken, other than how to use his fucking graphing calculator)” Meep: Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some device that could just disable graphing calculators? Like, you press a button, and boom! – they don’t work?” Me: I’m sure the technology exists. (thinking) Yeah, that would be awesome. (Thinking some more) That would be totally amazing.”Not as cool as the old standards – invisibility-at-will, flight, superhuman strength – but my ability to disable graphing calculators at will would actually save the world. Or, at least, it would save mathematics education.”(And my superhero name? I think I can go with Moebius Stripper on this one; if memory serves me, most female superheroes’ uniforms are pretty much indistinguishable from pole dancers’, so that fits.)”(If I were to have evil math-related powers, I guess I’d have to go with the ability to make logically impossible things happen. You know, three-sided squares, the square root of two being rational, God creating a rock He can’t lift – that sort of thing. Just to see what would happen. Then again, I fear that the fallout would be that the universe as we know it would totally collapse, leaving only politicians in its wake. Yeah, that would be evil.)

tall dark and mysterious » Sound And Fury, Meta-Meta.

Rip mathematics education