The elephant in the way...

It was quite the coincidence that my ex sent me an email this week entitled "For those who hate maths."

Maybe the person who cleverly put an elephant in the path of the "object" referred to in the drawing should have exercised genius and calculated the amount of interference the elephant would exert on the "object" and solved the problem with that factor included. Instead, the poor student got a big, fat ZERO as indicated in the drawing. She was probably a college theology major, huh?
Or maybe she was me and my kid.

You remember the old question about Farmer John. If his grain silo is 100 feet tall and measures, let's say, 25 feet around, and the poor fucking farmer has the silo filled only 2/3 of the way with oats, then how many bushels of crop does the fool have?

My answer to this question was always to say...1. We don't much grow oats in Oklahoma. 2. If Farmer John is relying upon someone else to tell him what he has then he....3. Needs to give up oats, sell the farm or declare bankruptcy or...4. Go to law school or...5. Go to work in the oilfield. Reasons being...as a lawyer the poor fucker doesn't need to know how many oats anyone has; he simply needs to be able to argue effectively that the amount was in excess of actual damages incurred. Things are even simpler in the oilfield. A barrel of oil equals 55 gallons. None of this feet and bushels stuff. It's easy math.

If any math is easy. My daughter's college advisor cleared the boards for this semester. There is an elephant in the way. Two remedial math courses and Jessica still can't get into college algebra, which she has to have to graduate. For this reason, she took only 12 hours, six of which bear the heavy burden of "Math in the Modern World." I suspect the instructor is a repressed Stephen Hawking looking to make psychology majors cringe.

I have one message for you, math person. We hate you.

We balance our checkbooks, listen to your prattle about interest and don't give a shit how much gas it will take us to go 400 miles. We know how to read the rain gauge after a deluge to see how much precipitation we have received. We can calculate the rate of your failure in emotional terms. We read, feel and interact and dare you to put that to numbers. Your hard analyses do not live in our world. Farmer John is one of us because he isn't sure. You put a man on the moon while people starved on Earth.

I respect the angles of roofs and the price the haves place on the breaths of the have-nots. I know the innate value of ONE HUNDRED AMERICAN DOLLARS. I know, and my kid knows, that if you do not have those ONE HUNDRED AMERICAN DOLLARS, you cannot take time off work for vacation, see the doctor when you are not well or buy food for your family. That is MATHS. If you were faced with an "object" rolling down a sterile ramp, wouldn't the world be best served if you plucked it off the ramp and hurled it straight into the eye of the weirdo who only cared how fast it was going or when it would reach ramp speed?

But there's an elephant in the way. My kid has to master Math in the Modern World before she can take college algebra. With only 12 hours, she has failed the first Maths test. There are only four in the course. Tomorrow is the next one. She called me crying tonight. I tried to reassure her. Normal people don't understand this and it means nothing. You just have to get through it.

In this way only, maybe Maths are distantly related to life. But it's a fucking stretch. Just do it and never look back.

May Farmer John rot in hell...