Dividing by Zero for Fun and Profit · 2:50am Feb 13th, 2015
Dear Loyal Watchers, Interested Visitors, and Confused Passersby;
It doesn't happen very often anymore, but every once in a great while I find myself in charge of a classroom where the kids are... well, good.
I don't just mean that they listen to directions, or that they do their work. What I mean is that they, when given the impetus to do so, choose to work quietly of their own accord. Every once in a blue moon I find myself in a classroom where I have to remember to look up form whatever papers I'm grading to check and see if some child is sitting there quietly with their hand raised, waiting to catch my attention rather than screaming across the room. I mean it! There are still classrooms out there where the students see the teacher stand and immediately put away whatever free-time project that are working on and get ready to work without being prompted to do so, or will choose to quietly read a book over running around the room like a manic gazelle.
Yes, sometimes I get such a class. It's not often, but it does happen.
I'm not saying that I'm trying to stifle the kids or make them abandon their individuality or some crazy crap like that, but to an educator knowing that I have the attention of a class means knowing that I can trust them with more responsibility, and that we can accomplish more and "let learning happen."
It also means that I can do stupid, crazy stuff and get away with it... like dividing by zero.
The ideal class fell into my clutches about two weeks ago. The teacher I was filling in for was away on jury duty, so I had the class for about five days in a row, which was truly something. This was a very good class, one that hung on my every word and stuck to the classroom routine in the absence of their regular teacher like adherents of a forgotten religion. As I looked over the math lesson I would be teaching the next day, a wicked thought crossed my mind, and a little grin went across my bearded features.
Yes, I thought, now I shall divide by zero for fun and profit.
The lesson itself concerned dividing by one and multiplying by zero and one. Pretty standard fare for third grade kids in the middle of the school year, ones who were looking forward to the 100th Day of School (a new secular holiday that has my endorsement). As the lesson progressed I began to feign being worried, even scared, and the kids began to pick up on it.
"Oh no!" I cried. "Can... can they possibly want us to... divide by zero!?"
The kids looked a little more worried.
"We... we can never divide by zero! What can we never do!?" I asked.
"Divide by zero," they answered, growing more and more befuddled. So, as the lesson went, I added more and more flourish every time the lesson mentioned dividing by zero and the impossibility of doing so, once even nearly fainting away with falsified angst. Finally, on the very, very last question of the lesson, the new unholy Common Core lesson-in-a-box asked the kids to come up for four multiplication and division fact families for some numbers... including one that can not be named.
"Mr. (T.D.)?" asked a young man named Matthew. "why should we never divide by zero?"
By now, my meme-based humor was attempting to burst out of my chest, and I could barely contain my smile.
"No!" I cried. "You must never, never, never divide by zero! No one knows what could happen! It's too dangerous!"
"But why..."
"Fine! Try it if you must! But I warned you!"
The kids looked at each other with bemusement, fear, and smiles.
Matthew lifted his pencil...
"Oh no! Quickly!" I called. "Hide under your desks!" And, because they were a good class... they did. "Aaargghh! It's happening again!" I continued. "You had to divide by zero, didn't you!?"
At that moment I started this video on the Smart Board. I had prepared it before class began, and had set it to repeat. I think it got the message across pretty well...
As the video played I exhorted my young charges to emerge from their hiding spots beneath their desks. "Quickly!" I implored them, "Put on your Groundhog Hats! Hurry, Hurry! Make barnyard animal sounds as you dance the Dance of the Groundhogs! We have to interpret grapefruit before the volcanologists discover France!"
Cue a group of eight and nine year olds wearing Groundhog Day hats making their way around their classroom as they clucked, mooed, whinnied, and quacked—each one doing a ancient, traditional dance that they had pretty much made up then and there. I myself did The Monkey and did an excellent interpretation of one of those goats that climb the trees in Spain.
"Quickly, quickly!" I exhorted. "Back in your seats and your Groundhog costumes off before the broccoli sees us!"
And, because they were a good class, they were back in their seats, their eyes back on their (bizarre) teacher before I had even closed out the video window, nothing more than a few giggles and smiling faces to show a class that will now, almost certainly, know that dividing by zero is not something they should ever attempt... mathematically or emotionally.
Sometimes I get a good class, one that I can trust with the unusual, zany, and utterly "me" things that I enjoy about my job...
... sometimes my life is just more awesome than I have any right to ask it to be.
Stay Awesome,
-T.D.
Wait, you're a TA?
Descy, I love you. You give me hope for the future.
Well you just prove that you are completely utterly bonkers
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I would have loved having you for a teacher, I think.
Oh, and:
n / 0 = ∞Stupid calculators propagating myths…
Someday I'll get a class as compliant as that, and when that day comes, I will remember your glorious example.
Lucky, lucky Mr. D! I'm glad that somewhere out there there is still some good little chitlins roaming about. Down here in Texas most of them are little asses. Can't hate too much though; I'm a big ass after all. Glad to hear you and the kids got to have some fun with it.
We need to go deeper!
...So what you're telling me is that next time I see you at Bronycon, we need to divide by zero at Quills and Sofas? Sounds good to me!
You win. I don't know what you've won, it it was certainly something real.
That story is awesome. I hope you don't mind if I share it with my art ed class tomorrow.
You evil, evil man. I salute you for this!
You. Are. GLORIOUS!
Nice.
It warms my heart to know that there are horseword authors at seemingly every level of the education system. Surely, this will be the greatest generation ever known.
Also, I dearly hope at least one of those kids had something like the following conversation with a parent:
"What did you learn in school, dear?"
"We learned what happens when you try to divide by zero."
"And what happens?"
"Insanity."
This put a big smile on my face, TD.
Anything divided by zero is zero... Man that was good!
Man, kids are so much fun.
Even when you're teaching college, and you have a bunch of engineering students. I'm glad I'm not the only teacher here.
When I win the lottery, I'm flying you out here and getting you a California substitute credential and talking the teacher into being sick (or having a full day of IEPs) and having you sub in the class I'm an assistant for (special ed, K-5) for my own amusement!
Of course, buying a lottery ticket would make that happen much faster...
That is wonderful.
So, you're a substitute teacher, probably one of the most put-upon, difficult and under-appreciated jobs in our society, and you've survived with enough wit and good humour for this?
My respect for you continues to grow.
P.S if you're not a substitute teacher, as I got the impression you were, I apologize for the assumption, but this was still awesome.
¡Do not do it! ¡You will kill us all!
Math was never that fun for me...then again they changed how they taught it the year after I graduated....
ten years later they learned the theory of limits and were profoundly saddened.
I'm in freshman year of High school and now I want to be in your class
Being a teacher where you have a class listen? Yeah, video above is appropriate :)
Good sir, you are brilliant.
I don't know if I envy you more for being able to get away with this stuff, or that class for having such a teacher.
In the spirit of dividing by zero, I feel compelled to give you all of my parabolic ham.
That was a wonderful, wonderful story. And all the better after having to do some crisis teaching myself yesterday, and feeling a bit down about the whole teaching thing. Hearing about you getting to do this really brightens my day.
You *can* divide by zero, actually. You get undefined, which is another way of saying infinity. But since involving infinity completely breaks any system that isn't calculus on drugs(ALL the drugs), it's rather pointless. You could presumably go the route of Complex Numbers and define it anyway, but that's *also* rather pointless.
Are you secretly Robin Williams? Because this sounds like the kind of thing Robin Williams would do in a role where he's playing a teacher.
That, or you're just even more awesome than I'd imagined.
>inb4 some kind of X Divides by 0 bandwagon inspired by this blog
Careful, TD. You don't know the power you wield.
You've gone off your rocker
2792251 As someone who graduated a year ago, I can say with confidence that it still sucks.
2792143
A substitute, by the sound of it.
And I like you ~10 times more knowing you're in the Elementary level of education. I may have already known and simply forgotten, who knows.
I did five years hard time as a Computer Lab IA at a K-5 school. Edu-fist bump!
TD, yoouz cray cray!
That's the most adorable thing I've ever heard.
What a truly fantastic class.
2792450
Shhh
Admiral Biscuit might hear.
Or I will
....crap.
2792217
Anything divided by zero is undefined, not zero.
2792633
Well, what ya waitin for then? LET'S DEFINE IT! >:D
*Evil genius laughter*
Wow. That's a very funny story T.D. Thanks for sharing with us
That was brilliant!
You magnificent lunatic.
2792804 Oh well. I presume that we could still arbitrarily define it anyway, the way we did for imaginary numbers. That brought us the Mind Screw known as "Complex Numbers", which is apparently useful for something?
I used to be good at math, but I couldn't keep up with the accelerated concepts. Well, I probably could have, but I didn't care enough to put in the required effort(Barely made it through Pre-Calc 30 and gave up on Calculus...) . I've gotten a lot better with language, though(It took until Grade 12 for me to finally get the thorn phoneme right), and in addition to being fanatically insistent on good storytelling(Hooray for everypony's favorite Morality Play!) I'm also something of a Semantic Inquisitor. That's sort of like a Grammar Nazi, except instead of eradicating bad syntax I would compel people to define things properly and convince them to actually care about it. Otherwise, words would be made so broad as to be useless. To define something is to set its bounds(See where I got infinity from? Not math), and defining things is what humans do(the tradition of Adam naming the animals comes to mind). In fact, I like to imagine humanity as a race of inverse Eldritch Abominations, who screw with the universe by forcing things to make sense.
2792633 That's multiplied... yeah, my calculator just gave me the error message... LOL... But since Devtion is the art of making sure everybody has the same amount.... if you have zero people to share things with, everything stays the same. Therefore... I guess we shouldn't worry about it. There is no need to.
2792143
I prefer the title "Educational Mercenary."
2792147
Thank you, Sergeant! I love me too!
2792150
That should not be news to anyone by this point!