Well, I don't know, is it a SMART fifth grader?
A mathematical rant that is not quite worthy of Rodney McKay, but for the record, if he was in my class, he would kill himself.
Probability and Statistics is a required course for Psychology majors at my school, and while I've done the statistics unit in my Data Analysis class, I'd never actually taken the basic gen-ed that's kind of supposed to be a pre-req (although you don't really need it to understand the Psych-specific stuff.) At any rate, I'm taking it now and some of the people in my class are just...yeah. Look, I get not being a math person. I'm not a math person.
But this is basic multiplication and division that's freaking people out. I mean - come on! You're in college! Put the calculator down! The minute these conversations started, I started transcribing them to email to my (math wiz) roommate, because, omg, seriously.
First we had this exchange...(I'll explain this just in case anyone cares what the hell I'm talking about with the actual numbers and doesn't already know them. I would avoid probabilities like the plague if I could, so I have no idea how many people that might be.) The problem calls for an ordering formula, with only one option in the first and last spaces and the middle spaces all being random. The formula looked like this: 1 * 13! * 1, but the person at the board expressed it as: 13!
Some girl: Wait, that's wrong, he forgot the ones.
Professor: No, you don't need the ones.
Some girl: Why don't the ones count?
Professor: ...We're multiplying.
Some Girl: But why don't we need to multiply the ones?
Professor: ...
Most of Class: ...
Some girl's friend: *also confused*
Professor: *o.O*
So we got that sorted out, and we're kind of chugging along, and doing some permutation problems, and eventually hit one that, if you wrote out the whole thing, looked like: 13 * 12 * 11 * 10 * 9 * 8 * 7 * 6 * 5, which is like...nobody wants to write that over and over, so the professor gave us the shortcut to trim it down, where you tack on whatever you need it to make it a clean fractorial (in this case, 4 * 3 * 2 * 1) and then divide it by the same fractorial you just put on, so it looked like: 13! / 4!. And all that's kind of neither here nor there, I just wanted it to explain this conversation:
Some girl's friend: Wait, why are we adding numbers?
Professor: We're not, we're canceling out.
Some girl's friend: How?
Professor: ...By dividing them by themselves.
Some girl's friend: But where do they go?
Professor: They're gone. We've canceled them out.
Some girl's friend: By dividing them.
Professor: ...Yes...
Some girl's friend: Can you always do that?
Professor: Divide?
Those two aren't the only ones the class who regularly make me go "whaaaaaa-aaat?" but they were in rare form today. Oooh, my.
Anyway, that happened, and then we spent some time relearning our 1x multiplication tables, and I got so bored I started drawing stick figures on my formulas. Yeah, math jokes, I said it.
And non-math related, but with Jonas! (Who I've yet to figure out how to indicate in stick figure form in a way that does not involve a banana.)
And in conclusion, I am a huge friggin' dork.
Probability and Statistics is a required course for Psychology majors at my school, and while I've done the statistics unit in my Data Analysis class, I'd never actually taken the basic gen-ed that's kind of supposed to be a pre-req (although you don't really need it to understand the Psych-specific stuff.) At any rate, I'm taking it now and some of the people in my class are just...yeah. Look, I get not being a math person. I'm not a math person.
But this is basic multiplication and division that's freaking people out. I mean - come on! You're in college! Put the calculator down! The minute these conversations started, I started transcribing them to email to my (math wiz) roommate, because, omg, seriously.
First we had this exchange...(I'll explain this just in case anyone cares what the hell I'm talking about with the actual numbers and doesn't already know them. I would avoid probabilities like the plague if I could, so I have no idea how many people that might be.) The problem calls for an ordering formula, with only one option in the first and last spaces and the middle spaces all being random. The formula looked like this: 1 * 13! * 1, but the person at the board expressed it as: 13!
Some girl: Wait, that's wrong, he forgot the ones.
Professor: No, you don't need the ones.
Some girl: Why don't the ones count?
Professor: ...We're multiplying.
Some Girl: But why don't we need to multiply the ones?
Professor: ...
Most of Class: ...
Some girl's friend: *also confused*
Professor: *o.O*
So we got that sorted out, and we're kind of chugging along, and doing some permutation problems, and eventually hit one that, if you wrote out the whole thing, looked like: 13 * 12 * 11 * 10 * 9 * 8 * 7 * 6 * 5, which is like...nobody wants to write that over and over, so the professor gave us the shortcut to trim it down, where you tack on whatever you need it to make it a clean fractorial (in this case, 4 * 3 * 2 * 1) and then divide it by the same fractorial you just put on, so it looked like: 13! / 4!. And all that's kind of neither here nor there, I just wanted it to explain this conversation:
Some girl's friend: Wait, why are we adding numbers?
Professor: We're not, we're canceling out.
Some girl's friend: How?
Professor: ...By dividing them by themselves.
Some girl's friend: But where do they go?
Professor: They're gone. We've canceled them out.
Some girl's friend: By dividing them.
Professor: ...Yes...
Some girl's friend: Can you always do that?
Professor: Divide?
Those two aren't the only ones the class who regularly make me go "whaaaaaa-aaat?" but they were in rare form today. Oooh, my.
Anyway, that happened, and then we spent some time relearning our 1x multiplication tables, and I got so bored I started drawing stick figures on my formulas. Yeah, math jokes, I said it.
And non-math related, but with Jonas! (Who I've yet to figure out how to indicate in stick figure form in a way that does not involve a banana.)
And in conclusion, I am a huge friggin' dork.