Math -- What Is It Good For? (WAS Mr. March Responds )

[macloudt]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., Andrew MacIan <andrew_macian at y...> wrote:
> Greetings from Andrew!
> Seriously, the students that actually showed for the
> two sections that I have this term (penance for some
> really wretched karma, no doubt, but I'll be blessed
> if I know what) turned out to be about half
> mouth-breathing 'athaletes' and the rest folks who
> need the class for BusAdmin or whatever.  The latter I
> can teach; the rest might pass....somehow.

Egad!  Even *I* performed better in math classes than the knuckle-
dragging athletes who needed to pass in order to stay on the football 
team!  One year in high school the football manager was my math 
teacher, and no one was surprised when Billy Quarterback, who would 
have signed his name with an X if he'd been able to make the lines 
cross each other, managed to pass the class *just* at the grade so he 
could stay on the team. Hmmm...

Oh, and in uni even us social sciences students made fun of the 
business admin students!

Here's one for you to enjoy, Andrew, and any other scientifically 
adept creatures out there...at uni I took a Humanities class called 
Darwin, Einstein and the Humanities.  Of course the Darwin bit was 
easy for me, but for the Einstein bit we actually had to grab the 
basics of his Theory of Relativity.  As if...we had to read a book by 
The Man himself about his theory called something like "A Simple 
Explanation that Anyone can Understand".  By page 12 I decided that I 
must be extremely stoopid, as I had no idea what the hell he was on 
about.  So I gave up and went to tutorial not having read it, but it 
turned out that none of my classmates understood it either (all 
Bachelor of Arts students, see).  It feels so much better to be in a 
collective of stoopids rather than an individual stoopid, don't you 
think?  Ah, the memory of my poor prof trying desparately to make us 
dullards understand the basics.  I never did quite grasp 'em, though 
I did do quite well in that class.

Nope, I'll keep on avoiding pure and applied science and keep on 
Fluff Meistering my way through life.  It's worked so far.

Cheers!

Mary Ann :)