We are traveling teachers. We have carts, and we zoom from room to room to room to room (etc.) while most of the students remain stationary in their desks and homerooms throughout the day. Most of the time we leave zero trace of our existence as we go, including wiping our fingerprints off of any surface we have touched or breathed on. In other words, we are the DNA-less teachers, criminals-in-training.
Occasionally
we forget to eliminate every trace, though. Sometimes we leave behind a paper,
a coffee cup, or, in my case, my own traveling bar stool that I attach to my
cart with a bungee so that I do not have to stand all day long as I teach
in-person and remotely five or six times a day in five or six different rooms.
The other
day the math teacher left a math problem on my board. At the end of the day
when I returned to my classroom, I saw the board but decided that I would worry
about erasing it later because my erasers live on the cart, the cart is bulky
and cantankerous, and I was just too plain exhausted to care. The next morning,
though, I took a closer look at the problem, which basically referred to
something or other and then solve for 25% of what, the “what” being the
variable.
I used to teach a math course, but it was only 20% of my day. I was at the time an 80% English teacher. I am now 100% English teacher (who still keeps college algebra and trig and pre-calc texts because it’s fun to solve equations – don’t judge me). I immediately set about solving the equation but not mathematically; I solved it linguistically.
You see, 25%
of WHAT would be either W or H or A or T, because each letter is ¼ of the word.
Since the W is first, it would be, if reading it as we Americans do, ¼ of the
word. It would be 25% of the word WHAT. Therefore, the 25% of whatever number
was on the board had to equal W. I looked at the math teacher’s directions and –
GUESS WHAT! (W-H-A-T)
Even she had
written that the answer would be: 25w.
Therefore,
my solution is valid and I stand by my answer. Class dismissed!
