Middle School Math Puzzle

Since there are middle school math parents and magazine editors among the core readership of this blog, I thought this might be interesting.

Keenan recently had a whole page of trapezoid area problems. Depending on how you approach it, you can get different answers, which I thought was a bit unfair. I'll explain what I'm talking about later, in case anyone wants to take a crack at it.

44 in the Bookstore

After my first class of the spring semester, I went to the bookstore to get my book.

It's amazing how much junk they sell in university bookstores nowadays. It takes fifteen minutes to slog through the aisles of flannel pajamas, dummies books, snow globes, stuffed animals, and every other piece of junk with the college logo on it to get to the book section.

They didn't have the math book I needed.

"We don't order that many here," the manager said. "Because we can't take the risk when students can get the books somewhere else."

"Don't you have any used copies?"

"No! We'd lose money if we did that."

I had homework, so I thought I'd try the library just to copy the first few pages. On the way out, I saw this:



Of course, I didn't see the 'ent' at the end of the poster at first.

At the library, the librarian helpfully searched for the book. "I doubt we have it," she said. "We never carry copies of books used in classes."

I asked her why not.

"Because if we did, " and swept her hand in a grand gesture, "this would all be dead. We'd have a library of dead books."

Me! Of all people!

When Bernie and I lived in Napa, we were devoted readers of the St. Helena Star. They had a seemingly endless supply of stories about people who grew up on vineyards, pursued other avenues, and then, surprisingly, at mid-life, found themselves with vineyards of their own, often inherited from their families. The emphasis in these stories was always on the unlikely chain of events that led to this improbable picture. Who would have thought it? Me! Running a vineyard! All my life I tried to get away from vineyards...

Hollywood is full of such stories. Her parents discouraged her, but Rumer Willis is going to try her hand at acting (and she's really good!). Jason ReitmanKasdanCoppola is a gifted director in his own right (he even raised his own money). It's why I can't take it seriously when Sherwood Schwartz walks the picket line with his son (Sheldon?)--who, in a stunning turn of events, found himself running the Brady Bunch at the age of tweny-three--and his grandson, a young writer who also somehow managed to find his way into the family business.

But I can't completely claim the high ground, because my mother was a writer and my grandfather was a writer. I'd love to be able to emphasize the circuitous path I took to get here, but really I'm just another son of a vintner running away from grapes. Who would have thought it? Me! Writing scripts!

And yet the fact is, it wasn't writing that got me through school, it was math. And I have a fantastic factoring problem I want to post. But I'd need to learn how to type exponents on my keyboard, and realistically that's not going to happen.

Recreational Mathematics

www.flatlandthemovie.com

This looks like it would be pretty good. For some reason, it's not available through Netflix.