Tuesday, January 01, 2008

In my 9th grade math class, we had something called a POW, or Problem of the Whenever (like a Problem of the Week... but less frequent). I was surprisingly comfortable giving my POWs absolutely ridiculous titles. The following is a sampling:

Some guy at home plate who needs to walk to third base but makes it needlessly complicated by trying to figure how far it is even though in the game of baseball there is no need to go from home plate to third base, and even more so, no need to figure out how long it is in the first place (AKA POW Mathematics and Baseball)

The mathematician who had to buy opaque jars to store his marbles in and needed to take them out one at a time to see which of his marbles were in which jar because he was illiterate and didn’t know how to properly label jars.
(AKA Problem of the Whenever #2)

The mathematician who had to buy opaque jars to store his marbles in and needed to take them out one at a time to see which of his marbles were in which jar because he was illiterate and didn’t know how to properly label jars’s brother who didn’t know how to use a simple protractor to measure angle A but used a ruler to measure all the other lines and found out that all the triangles were isosceles. (AKA P.O.W. #3)

Samantha learns to read the whole problem instead of just guessing what is implied, even though she should have learned because this is exactly what screwed her over in the marble POW, aka The Strange Shapes POW.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

reminds me of frontiers of science. thank you, back of the envelope calculation.