Real Life Situations

1. You are inviting at least 20 and at most 30 people to your birthday party. (You assume that if you invite this many people then maybe someone will show up.) You want four times as many people wearing blue shirts than people wearing orange shirts. Draw a graph to show the solutions.

My head spins with the agony of trying to solve the problem. My brain melts to goo as I try to wrap my mind around what any of it means. I would have better luck trying to understand a foreign language than trying to decipher the random numbers, letters and crazy looking symbols on the page.

If I were a superhero, graph paper would be my kryptonite. It has so many tiny lines. And how am I supposed to write any letter or number on this page? I have to carefully place every digit in it's own square, but it just winds up looking stupid anyways. Oh, graph paper, how I loathe thee!

Then I read a word problem. Thank, God. Something I understand. Words! And better yet, these word problems are supposed to show me how I can use this math in real life situations. Finally something logical comes out of all this madness! But, soon, I find myself severely disappointed.

This. Is. Absurd.

Math likes to think it's so important, but it isn't as special as it thinks. Math is like your high school prom queen. Since she's in a bunch of clubs and knows so many people and has so much money, she thinks that the school would completely fall apart without her. Well, maybe it would, but really how often are you like, "Wow, I really need that prom queen around right now?" Never. Math is like that. Mathematicians create these word problems that mention things like World Geography, Bake Sales, Psychology and Carnivals, to try to make you think that you use math in everyday situations. Math, like your prom queen, likes to prove that it can be a vital factor of your everyday life.

The key word here is can. Yes, I could use a complicated math problem to decide how many people should wear what colored shirt to my birthday party, but why would I? I mean, let's say I want to buy a rather expensive giant rubber band ball. I'm sure I could think of a billion situations in which it could be useful, but most of the time, it's just going to be sitting around doing nothing. Then, when the day comes that it actually is useful, I'll rub it in every one's faces. My giant rubber band ball was useful once, in the ten years I owned it. (I actually did at one point own a rubber band ball. It was mostly just fun to toss in the air...until I lost it.)

Okay, math is important. Without math, science would be just a bunch of nonsense. It's sort of like how spelling and grammar are important to reading and writing. So, I understand, math. You're alright. But don't try to pretend that you're cooler than you are. Because, well....You're not.