Last night Natalie needed help with her math homework. She asked, “Are you sure you know how to do it?” I told her that I couldn’t be sure until I saw the questions, but that I was somewhat confident in my abilities in 4th grade math. I am, after all, The Arithmetic Wizard.
It was decimals and the first set of questions said to write the numerical form of phrases such as two and forty-seven hundredths. Pu-lease. Give me at least a little challenge. The next set asked us to write numbers like 4.36 in expanded form. I didn’t really know what that meant but I hoped it meant the inverse of what we did in the first set. Just write it out, right? We did that and then the next set said, “Write the following numbers in word form.” Wait a minute. I think we just did that. So, what is expanded form? Of course, we had the worksheet only, no text or lesson, and Nat had missed school the day before. She was waiting. Seeing that I was stuck she smugly asked, “Wizard?”
Maybe I would need to downgrade that to Sage or Erudite or something. But this was kind of unfair. It wasn’t math, it was math terminology. Hoping to glean clues from subsequent sections I read ahead. “Write the following numbers in long form.” What?! More forms? Homogeneous form. Euclidean form. Neo classical form. Lite form. Extra spicy with swirls form. I see what is going on here, the math guys asked the marketing guys for help.
2 comments:
I think I heard about some lay-offs at Nabisco in the Ritz R&D department. Looks like they found other work.
this is so true! the terminology throws me off every time!
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