My professor just said, in repsonse to a comment by a student, that he was 96% right. The porfessor then asked a follow up, which the student couldn’t answer, and he said, ‘You’re four tenths away from there. Or 4%’. Now it is possible and even likely that that was a slip of the tongue. I have been noticing the (growing?) inability to use numbers in every day situations. Innumeracy pointed this out to me, and I think that too few people agree. Luckily the author put it in a form understandable by those who need it most: word-form. Luckily he’s only charging $10 for a new copy. Still, it has yet to and probaly will not catch on, leaving my PhD professor thinking either that 100 – 96 = 40 (which it doesn’t for those who don’t know) or that 4/10 = 4/100 and not 40/100.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry here. At first I cry because it is so sad how little people want to learn math. I will certainly post on this later, but everywhere I go, even at my ivy-covered institution, math is silly and scorned, and the ‘written studies’ like history or political science are praised (and used). Then, after drying my tears, I realize that I don’t need to worry. Society may have failed to teach people, but in doing so, gave me a great opportunity to teach them myself. There are too many programs to write, people to tutor, or professors to correct for me to worry about finding something to do in life. Now I just need to convince people they need to know math bad enough to pay me.
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