I’ve been on the phone with my college flatmate tonight, talking about writing. Apparently, I actually do have some fun and crazy ideas that would be really interesting for people to read – she didn’t even understand how I got to the sorts of ideas that regularly come to mind, simply as the normal order of thinking in my head. So, I guess that’s not so normal as I’d thought it to be, having such ideas so casually and regularly.
The thing is, I haven’t set up sitting down to do it. Not yet, anyway, and not for long enough. I’ve noticed that writing at night is not the way to go for me. For other things, sure – I can do loads of physical movement at night. For writing, however, I’m next to hopeless, it feels. I don’t feel much like writing anything in the first place at night, and so I struggle to find something to write, and then I make loads of errors in what I do finally write. It just isn’t a good combination.
Speaking of combinations, I was talking with students in my geometry class today about how math can be useful in life in cool ways. One example was from a show my stepdad watches about the TV show “The Walking Dead”. It’s sort of a behind-the-scenes sort of show, and this particular bit that I saw was talking about everything they had to do in order to set up a car crash. It was really cool, seeing everything broken down, all of the things they had to organize to make it work. The best part, perhaps, was seeing how it was pure geometry and physics that made the crash work flawlessly.
The other example was in a little photo shoot I was witnessing (and had to abandon for distress), in which the photographer said that they were supposed to be sitting in a Christmas tree formation. But she didn’t do anything to make this happen. She didn’t even seem to know what needed to be done for this shape to happen. (The people in charge definitely seemed to be lacking in general crowd control and effective instructions arenas, too.) It occurred to me that she never considered just getting the number of people – I’d have done it ahead of time, but on the sport would have worked just finely, too – expected in the photo, and dividing them up into the necessary number of people per row, based on the exact shape desired and the number of rows available. I was about to begin the calculations as I watched, but then realized that no one was going to listen to me anyway, so it was better if I just left the stressful situation, since that was the only thing I actually could do in the situation. So, I left. But it proved to be a good example to the kids in class at how math is present in life in ways that people don’t even consider. Had the photographer thought about math, – and it is likely that she didn’t, because she wasn’t very confident in or in love with math while in school – the whole photo shoot could have gone loads better than it did. And they could have had the Christmas tree, and even decorated with “lights” or an outline, using the different shirt and jacket colors present and available. But she didn’t, so none of that happened.
Post-a-day 2017
hannah ananas 