I have been working on a post that hasn't been published yet. I wrote about last Sunday and how we spent Sunday morning. Once I put it on my blog you will know what this next sentence truly means. I was soooooo in the Word this morning. Nothing could get me out of it. Roy tried several times but to no avail. I was firmly staying put in the Word. Even Buddy stayed by my side as I continued on in the Word. I enjoyed my small group fellowship time as well.
Yesterday, I was telling Roy about a column in The New Yorker. It seems this mathematician wants to raise the funds for a Math Museum. Uh...no thanks. He is working all the angles (ha ha) to raise support for his idea. He takes groups on math tours in Manhattan. Of course reading words like grid, hypotenuse, hyperbolic paraboloids nearly cause me to stop reading the article but I pressed through it. When I had nearly given up on reading to the conclusion, this paragraph caught my attention.
"In Whitney's view (math guy), the standard progression in math education-algebra, geometry, trig, pre-calculus, calculus-is random and baseless, a linear conceit that creates a false sense of increasing difficulty. Mathematical ignorance is insidious, and manifests itself in many ways. The purest example is the lottery, he said. The lottery is a tax on the mathematically illiterate."
I remember feeling so defeated when wrestling with the basic concepts of algebra in high school. It was overwhelming and it seemed impossible. I knew math was just there to get harder and harder. So I just took the attitude that I didn't care. Really, past using the basics, I have never used, to my basic math knowledge, an equation. I don't care about a+b=c-[ab-cd/xyz] On a side note, I think we do this to believers who want to grow more in their relationship with Jesus. Heck, I do it to myself. I make things so much harder than it needs to be for me to walk with Christ. Jesus wants our success far more than we do. We make it sound so difficult and at times it is, but especially in "ministry related things" we want those growing ones to jump through the hoop and perform some dashing feats before we give them approval and encourage them to keep leaning into Jesus. We tell them it gets harder and harder as we follow the Lord, but really it should be easier and easier cause as we grow we know, we can't do it. We have to give it up, let it go, release control and give it over to the Lord. I read something the other day about control, when we want to control everything, we are the one doing all the work. Doesn't seem worth it to me. Of course God knows we are going to take things back to work on them and then in desperation hand them back over to Him. I have known people who don't take things back once they have given something over to God, but they are few and far between. Well, I digressed from the point. No surprise here. But I wonder if math was presented in some other way to those who are not math gifted, if we would have progressed farther than we ever thought we could? I asked Roy what would I use trig for? I asked about all the math disciplines. His conclusion is I use geometry more than anything else. That's good, but don't ask me to show my work.
When Dena and I had dinner at the Macaroni Grill in San Antonio, we used the white paper table cover and the crayons to do some math. We loved keeping up with that $200.00 credit. Dena was charting and showing her work when it came to her conclusions of where we were on the credit. We calculated at that time we probably had about $70.00 left. All of the sudden I am making up equations using time, materials, dinner, and gifts. OK, in a blog it doesn't sound all that funny, but believe me we were saying and showing our work on some very funny things. For just a moment in time I felt very mathematical.
After a delicious dinner, we headed over to Border's Books. If you have a Border's gift card, I would be using it pretty soon. The store has the look of bankruptcy or soon to be bankruptcy. We got back to HHC before dark. We grabbed us some decaf cappuccinos, duly noted it on our spending record and headed out to the pool and then the porch to watch dusk turn to evening.
This is when we began discussing Bon Qui Qui and the girl who plays in her stand up routine on getting a mani/pedi. When we got back to our room, I pulled out my Blackberry so Dena could watch the routines. She loved them, most do.
All this talk of math and math related things, makes me want to go balance my check book.... Gotcha, no way. All this talk of math is having the same effect on me that it always has, it's making me sleepy. I had some of the best naps of my life in algebra.
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