Math, Meaning and Mulch (Part 2)

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Just had a great evening mulching and edging our apple tree. I ran out of mulch and ground paper, but I can get more tomorrow.

As I worked, I used a catch (see last post) to collect my thoughts. The one I used is my favorite - it’s a mnemonic device. I used the rhyming peg method, (”one is the sun, two is a shoe, three is a tree,” etc.) and only needed to get to “door” for the four Ideas I had been mulling over.

(Note: After I’ve finished posting all the lessons on basic math I want to put up on the MathMojo site, I’ll start working on Memory Mojo, and explain all the memory hacks I have been using, with lots of tips).

If you read the last post, you remember that I’d been pondering some Ideas as I mulched the tree, but had forgotten them by the time I wanted to write them in this blog. So I went back with a catch, and hoped that by resuming mulching, I could get back into the thoughts I was having.

It worked. The first thought I wanted to record was this:

I a had already mulched half of the ground below the tree last year. The entire area is about - well, you figure it out - the radius is about 18 feet. The formula for the area of a circle is pi times the radius squared. Pi can be rounded to about 3 for our purposes here.

Unfortunately, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I had read about several methods, and had used a fairly “organic one.” I weeded under the tree, tilled the soil with a hoe, and covered everything with a layer of newspaper and soaked the paper down with a hose. Then the I covered the entire thing with a 3 inch layer of fresh grass clippings from our lawn.

This spring there were lots of weeds poking out of the entire area. Damn!

What this all lead me to think was how there are lots of ways to do things, but the most thorough is usually the best.

What does that have to do with math? Isn’t it apparent? Schools try to cover “curriculum” within certain time frames. If the material is throroughly learned or not is not important. As long as they learn enough to pass a test.

Last year I passed the mulch test. I did it successfully. I weeded, tilled, and mulched. I could say I did the job.

The weeds didn’t care if I could say I did the job or not, though.

Math and reality don’t care how you did on your test. The test is just for the bureaucrats to be able to say they tested you.

Math requires a deeper appreciation for reality than those superficial school textbooks and standardized tests will give you.

Well, that’s a lot of typing for today, so let’s save some of the further insights of today’s mulching project for the next post.

Today’s suggestion: Get a good method of catching your thoughts. A small memo book and a golf pencil are easy to carry around.

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