Back to school
Schools opened after Easter in South Africa yesterday, and last night, a young boy came up to me with the greatest dread of any kid on opening day;- HOMEWORK!
It was mathematics, and he had some simultaneous equations he had to solve before the following day, and then hand them in.
Rather than do them for him, I formulated some of my own, did them with him, and then let him work out some on his own while I watched to see if he had gotten the gist of it.
The thing about some kids is they take everything so LITERALLY, and it was his literal application, of what I told him to be the easiest way of doing the math, that made me sit up and notice what has to be one of the greatest ironies of the classroom.
***It may be said, to make everything plain, that, by the time I am done with my "Counting Numbers" lecture project, I will have gone through even these simultaneous equations;- forget what the calculator tells as the answer when one multiplies a 'negative' number by a 'negative'... I am out to rip EVERYTHING apart, so that when I move on to publish the first part of the trio of books I am writing, no kid is going to go through what I went through simply because some "great thinker" stated some nonsense as "law", and nobody bothered to understand what he said simply because they did not want to "appear" stupid!***
Anyway, there was this one equation that he simplified...eh..."thusly";
-3y + 4x = -22......(eqn i)
[step 1];=> -3y + 4x -4x = -22 - 4x
[step 2];=> -3y/(-3) = (-22 - 4x)/(-3)
therefore, y = -22 - 4x
-3
which reduces to; y = -1( 22 + 4x )
-3
:=> y = 22 + 4x
3
which reduces to; y = -1( 22 + 4x )
-3
:=> y = 22 + 4x
3
The kid had seen me do it like that in the three or so problems we worked out , so he assumed that one always chooses the expression on the extreme left, and removes the one nearest the equal sign, but anyone who has any 'experience' with numbers or these expression will automatically do it another way... which, though not quite so obviously as flawed as the above, will STILL raise questions about just how one would get to make the 'y' the subject of the formula.
Now, what is wrong with the working above? Well, I would say, but since it is a US$25m dollar answer so that I can research for my other books, I suppose everyone will have to wait for the lecture now, wont they?
I have a shock in store for the academic world...the BIGGEST of this era, and I am just getting warmed up...
COUNT1NG NUMB3R5...
the Upcoming Book That Will Rock The World!!!
