A Different Angle on Angels
By Chris Dunmire, C- Math Student
My right-brained creative slant has always kept me deeply impressionable to the more subtle, emotional sides of life. I find myself preferring to spend more of my time immersed in imaginative innuendo than in rational reality. Despite that, I'm aware of how important those "R"s rolling out of left-brained territory are to balancing out my being: Realism, Reason, Relations, Rational thinking...
Take mathematics for instance, 'the science of numbers.' We need to understand how math works in order to make use of it in everyday matters (don't miss my theory on where discarded numbers go). Creatives use math all the time. Artists use it to calculate how much material they'll need for a project; graphic designers use rulers, fractions, and decimals right along with inch, pica, and pixel measurements; authors have word- and page-count quotas to fulfill and calculate how many words-per-day they need to write to meet a deadline (and how their royalty percentages might stack up). Think of the many other ways creative people use math to get along in the world.
I can handle simple math problems and common uses of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Whole-number percentages... those too.
1 + 5 = 6
19-13 = 6
2 x 4 = 8
100/25 = 4
5% of 100 = 20
But once you start complicating matters by layering in multiple operations with decimals and percentages and finding an evenly sliced piece of pi, I'd really rather be reading the dictionary.
0.1 + 5π (19-7) x 2³ (15/3 + 2n) / 3% =
Yep, that's me over there with Merriam Webster. So it's probably no surprise that after 6th grade my math grades averaged
C - D + /
(I don't even know what is! But I do know that you find the average of something by adding up all the numbers and then dividing by the number of numbers!)
I believe I learned enough about math to figure out how many square feet of carpeting my living room needs. Or how much money I'll save with a 30%-off coupon. And how glad I am to be married a man who knows how to use a scientific calculator (and gladly gives me practical math lessons every time he thinks I need them. Thanks, love.)
Indeed, knowing basic math is an important life skill, one that serves us well, especially if you want to avoid being co-dependent on other math-sters. I'll be the first to say, however, that math has never saved me from walking out the front door with two different shoes on. (Now if I had three shoes on, well, then I bet it'd kick in...)
Let's get back to that soft, sensitive side of me — the one that's impressionable to the imprinting of highly-charged emotional memories, such as the time a particular grade school teacher made an embarrassing big deal — in front of the entire class — over a student's (not me) incorrect usage of the word angels (celestial beings) instead of angles (triangular slants) in a writing assignment.
Okay, we all kind of laughed at the thought of triangles sporting wings and halos, but the poor girl's blunder was held up high for us all to learn from as she suffered some embarrassment (good thing she didn't attempt to spell Isosceles). And I DID learn. Ever since, when facing the usage of either of those two words in my writing, that elementary school memory comes back to haunt me. Yes, thanks to a very proactive teacher I have the I will not make THAT spelling mistake complex. And now you know where the inspiration for my Nit Wits #49 (Divine Angles) comes from.
Because the English language is so full of tricky words like these, I try to exercise extra forgiveness when I and others get tangled in writing mishaps. Spell-check is not infallible: it will spell even the most commonly misused words correctly. Let my Divine Trinity of Angles — Scalene, Equilateral, and Isosceles — serve as an important spelling lesson and reminder of that to you! •
Next: Nit Wits Comic #50 »
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