Weapons of Math Instruction

So, my grandmother is in town this week, and there's pros and cons to that; one of the pros being, of course, that her presence sparked what is about to become this blog post. See, she's sharing the bathroom with me and while I was brushing my teeth today I saw the comb she left beside the sink. It was a nondescript comb made of plastic, unadorned except for the word "UNBREAKABLE" - I suppose my grandmother's wispy white hair has vanquished many a weak comb in her day. Regardless, it reminded me of a certain conclusion that I came to in high school - math is dangerous.

This startling conclusion came one day while working on some sort of group project, you know, one of those that required an awful lot of work to get a small bit of pointless information across. Said useless project required the use of many arts and crafts tools, including a straight-edge owned by my friend. It was a transparent red ruler, of the normal length, with the words "Non-shatter" printed on it.

Immediately, I tested the ruler's flexibility, finding it to be somewhat bendable. I then began to bang the ruler on many nearby surfaces, with the usual respect that I have for other people's property, testing the validity of the non-shatter claim.

Seeing this behavior that would have eventually resulted in the demise of his ruler, my friend cautiously asked me, aware that I had a blunt object in my hand, "What are you doing?"

"Well, it's unbreakable!"

He winced as I hit the ruler hard on the desk, then said, "It says non-shatter not unbreakable. You can still break it."

I looked down at the ruler, frowning slightly. Non-shatter? What kind of ruler shattered, I pondered, envisioning flying shards of plastic as the ruler broke on impact. Why in the world would you need a ruler that didn't shatter? "So what would happen when it broke?" I asked, my ever-questioning engineering tendencies popping up even in high school.

My friend shrugged. "Just snap in half I guess."

I held the ruler up to the light, inspecting it. "So it would be like this long jagged break?" My mind analyzed the meaning of this. "Dude, you could use it as a shiv!"

My friend stared at me, obviously not coming to the same conclusion with the same rapidity as myself. "Um..."

"Yeah! Just imagine! You could get it delivered to you in prison - just a ruler, right? Well, then all you need to do is snap it in half and - BAM - you can shank somebody right there!"

My friend laughed nervously and quickly changed the subject, taking advantage of the next possible opportunity to wrest the non-shattering ruler/shiv from my hand.

Later that night I got to thinking - forget a file, a basket of school supplies was the best thing to give to someone in prison. Previously I and a set of friends had established, during a painfully useless drafting class, that a metal protractor could be used as a perfect hand-to-hand weapon, provided you held the tool by the horizontal bar and sharpened the curvy part. And, of course, as a grade schooler we had been sternly warned not to fool around with the pointy end of a compass, for it could cause a painful puncture wound.

Actually, in a pinch, even a simple mechanical pencil could be used as a weapon. There was this one kid on the bus in elementary school who got viciously stabbed in the palm by another kid with a lead pencil. (No, this actually happened. Like, that's not even the hyperbole that you've come to know and love from me. The kid had a frickin' hole in his hand from the lead. People don't believe me when I tell them I'm from the suburban ghetto.)

What does all of this mean? That I have an overactive imagination? No, silly. That math, and the tools used to enforce its horrible policies, is incredibly dangerous. The best way to defeat it, of course, is to learn its intricacies, allowing you to know its weaknesses. So the next time you're surprised by a constant in a dark alley - BAM - derive that mofo!

And for those wondering, yes, this is why I decided to go into a math-heavy field. Math must be vanquished!