Math and guns

The husband, laughing so hard he could barely talk, just asked me to come watch our Eldest’s little speech on the ‘farewell to Mr. H’s class’ DVD – the end of year compilation of all the adorable children from sixth grade. (This was from last year, mind you.)

So I stood there and watched my darling child tell the camera, in her earnest and slightly nerdy way, the following:

“Yeah, OK, so…math? It’s kind of boring and stuff? But? You can totally use it to make, like, bows. And guns. And stuff like that. Yeah. That’s what my mom says, anyway.” {smile!}

{head-desk}

And now I know why alllllll the teachers at her school tend to kind of…look.at.me., all funny like that…

(Funny thing being, our actual conversation on the topic was more like, “Well, shoot, honey, think about a bow and arrow…now, you can use math to figure out how many pounds of pressure per square inch your arrow exerts on the target and how many feet it travels per second, and then you can experiment with different bows and start making note of what changes cause which effects, if a shorter bow with a bigger arch makes it go faster or hit harder, and then you can incorporate those findings into the next bow you build, see? And you can get better at hitting the target in the first place if you can get a basic understanding of geometry, how shapes work, and the physics of movement blah blah blah, mom keeps going LONG after the pre-teen’s attention span has officially ended, blah blah blah…)

(Except that she obviously retained the key words ‘bow’ and ‘gun’ and ‘math’ and then threw them all together in her ‘bye, Mr. Teacher, it’s been so awesome being your class and by the way I’m totally going to build myself a gun using the math you taught me, buh-bye!! {smile!}” speech.)

(Once again…{head-desk!}…)