Day: June 23, 2013

Bad puns

I thought I saw an eye-doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.

A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: ‘You stay here; I’ll go on a head.’

I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: ‘Keep off the Grass.’

The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

A backward poet writes inverse.

In a democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes.

If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you’d be in Seine.

A vulture carrying two dead raccoons boards an airplane. The stewardess looks at him and says, ‘I’m sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.’

Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.

Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, ‘I’ve lost my electron.’ The other says, ‘Are you sure?’ The first replies, ‘Yes, I’m positive.’

Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root-canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.

There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

green lineAnd now for some math puns:

What’s purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.

What is lavender and commutes? An Abelian semigrape.

What’s purple, commutes, and is worshipped by a limited number of people? A finitely-venerated Abelian grape.

What do you get when you cross a mountain goat with a mountain climber? You can’t — a mountain climber is a scalar.

How does a linear algebraist get an elephant in a refrigerator? He splits the elephant into components, stuffs the components in the refrigerator, and declares the refrigerator closed under addition.

On joking with students

At some point in recent years, my students lost the ability of discerning when I playfully give them a hard time. To pick just one example of many from last semester…

Student: Did you get my homework that was slid under your door last Thursday?
Me: Oh, so *that’s* what I threw in the trash on Friday.
Student: (groans) I told my friend that she should’ve put it in your mailbox. Is there anything I can do to get my homework to you?
Me: Nope. C’est la vie.

I kept this up for about a minute before telling him that I was only kidding and that I had his homework. And this is just one of several anecdotes I could relate.

I conclude that either:

  1. I’m a world-class comedic straight-man up there with Bud Abbott and “Super” Dave Osborne,
  2. I’ve now old enough to be around the age of my students’ fathers instead of their older brothers, and so the jokes that worked 10 years ago elicit a different response now, or
  3. (more likely) Students have been so conditioned by past experiences with inflexible and uncompromising professors that they react submissively when I feign unreasonableness.

Measuring terminal velocity

Using a simultaneously falling softball as a stopwatch, the terminal velocity of a whiffle ball can be obtained to surprisingly high accuracy with only common household equipment. In the January 2013 issue of College Mathematics Monthly, we describe an classroom activity that engages students in this apparently daunting task that nevertheless is tractable, using a simple model and mathematical techniques at their disposal.

Hollywood Hates Math

Dan Meyer spliced together scenes from various movies where knowledge of mathematics is denigrated. Since a big part of my job is instilling confidence in my students that they can indeed succeed in my classes, it’s a little depressing to see that I have a big opponent in popular culture.

This video has the occasional PG language and innuendo, while I prefer to keep my classes rated G to every extent possible. Some time ago, Dan was kind enough to post the original movie sources for this clip, and someday I might edit down this clip to something that I would be comfortable showing in class.

A rejoinder to “Is Algebra Necessary?”

From a terrific article “Reflections on Mathematics and Democracy” by Lynn Arthur Steen, a past president of the Mathematical Association of America.

So we face three distinct challenges:

– Addressing the many weaknesses evident in mathematical learning;

– Reducing the gulf between the traditional pre-calculus curriculum and the quantitative needs of life, work, and citizenship;

– Teaching mathematics in a way that encourages transfer—for citizenship, for career, and for further study.

I suggest that these three challenges are manifestations of a single problem, and that all three can be addressed in the same way:  by organizing the curriculum to pay greater attention to the goal of transferable knowledge and skills.

There are many ways to accomplish this, for example:

– by embedding mathematics in courses focused on applications of mathematics;

– by team-taught cross-disciplinary courses that blend mathematics with other subjects in which mathematical thinking arises (e.g., genetics, personal finance, medical technology);

– by project-focused curricula in which all school subjects are submerged into a class group project (e.g., design a solar powered car).

– by career-focused curricula in which a cohort of students focuses all their school work on particular career areas (e.g., technology, communications, or business).