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I just finished up the grading of my first Calculus exam for the semester, and it is depressing how very little algebra or trigonometry the students seem to grasp, even though I’ve spent five weeks describing in some detail prcisely the kinds of algebra and trigonometry they need to be capable of.  It reminds me of a poem from Ralph P. Boas, Jr. that I am henceforth going to add to all of my future Calc I syllabi.

Prerequisites

How could you be a cowhand
If you couldn’t ride a horse?
If you yearn to cook for gourmets
You’ll need some food, of course.
You can master many subjects
If you only have the will;
But how can you cope with calculus
If your algebra is nil?

How could you sing in opera
If you haven’t any voice?
If music is too difficult
There is another choice.
Rewards in Math are plenty
But this obstacle looms big:
How can you shine in calculus
If you won’t learn any trig?

I saw this over at GraphJam and laughed for an hour.

I just got out of a department meeting during which one of the items of discussion was a modification of the computer science major.  Essentially, the modification gives CS students more flexibility in fulfilling their science requirement.  During the discussion, a question was raised about the requirement for X many credits of science and Y many credits of corresponding labs, to which one of the profesors commented “To keep CS students from taking Physics for poets,” a class that, while probably of little use to upcoming CS majors, did inspire the following doodle hastily scribbled amongst my meeting notes.

A robot joke I heard.

Restaurant patron: Waiter?  Oh, robot waiter?

Robot waiter: Yes?

Restaurant patron: What’s this robot doing in my soup?

Robot waiter: It looks like it’s doing human tasks twice as well.

Awesome.

The Ladybug and I have been listening to Here Come the 123s, a CD that combines two of my favorite things: They Might Be Giants and mathematics.  Here is another song off the album called “One Everything,” which does a nice job distinguishing between the immensity of all objects and the singularity of the set that contains all of them.  (This is akin to the set containing the empty set being nonempty, only at the other end of the cardinality spectrum.)  The video is on YouTube, after C is for Conifers.

One Everything

There’s only one everything.
Remember these words,
There’s only one everything.
And if you go out and count up everything
It all adds up to one.

There’s only on everything.
The last time I checked
There’s only one everything.
It kind of makes sense that there would only be
Just one, not ten, not three.

If you get all the stuff together
And you have not left something out,
Then would there still be anything left over?
I’m pretty sure that means that there could not.

We share the same omniverse.
(Please clean your room.)
We share the same omniverse,
And even though you are over here and not there,
There’s just one everywhere.

You’ve got the cars, the trees, the house,
There are some clouds, some birds, a monster,
And when it’s all too much to count up
You can put it in one pile.

What if you drew a giant circle?
What if it went around all there is?
Then would there still be sucha thing as the outside?
And does that question even make any sense?

There’s only on everything.
The last time I checked
There’s only one everything.
It kind of makes sense that there would only be
Just one, not ten, not three.

Not… twelve.

There’s only one everything.
Remember these words,
There’s only one everything.
And if you go out and count up everything
It all adds up to one.
It all adds up, it all adds up, it all adds up to one.