Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Maylan Schurch
Friday, July 19, 2024
Thursday of this week I was ending a visit to our local library. As I strolled by an empty table, I noticed that someone had forgotten a spiral notebook with a pencil and a math answer sheet of some kind.
I snapped this photo, and later pulled it up on my computer screen and studied it. It’s been an eternity since I did algebra problems—if that’s what these are—and unless you had my intensity of math-phobia, you cannot comprehend the depth of weariness I feel as I gaze on this sheet.
And the more I scan through these answers, the “behinder” in math I feel. Take the first question at the top, for example, the first part of which I reproduce here:
2* = x+9
I understand that “x” is indeed an essential part of the torture which is algebra, but what does the asterisk mean? Back in my day (he said, hand feebly gripping his tottering cane), all they threw at us were letters of the alphabet. Yet the “*” seems to be important, because it’s present in most if not all of the other answers too.
What’s so impressive, of course, is that the diligent scholar who owns the above pencil, and who I hope is rapidly reunited both with it and its markings, did all 10 problems of Lesson 11 (“L11,”) and soldiered on through all 10 problems of “L12.” And what’s more, this was July 18 and not a date within a normal school year.
So here we have a methodical student, who for some reason is having to muscle through and master a species of math during summertime. He (the handprinting seems masculine) has my deepest sympathy. He’s no doubt beginning to understand the answers, while I have no clue about what these problems are even trying to solve, and what practical value their solutions might even have. That’s not in my “wisdom wheelhouse.”
Fortunately God understands all wisdom, and has promised that He will provide it in the kind and quantity we need. Click the link below to find Bible verses which talk about this.