Frazz by Jef Mallett for December 04, 2015

Resistance may be futile, but it will also make an easy thing hard.

I don’t even understand it in my own language. Hail the calculators!

How about a reciprocating saw?Now listen, no cutting remarks, please.

Yes, that part is easy to understand. What isn’t clear, is what actual USE reciprocals have.

I hope this is going toward Cauldwell learning a lesson—I use reciprocals to solve math and science problems all the time. (Including unit analysis, the go-to quick check that you have set up a problem correctly.) Your math-based education is grinding to a very early halt if you stick at “rewrite an algebra equation? Sorry, my calculator can’t do that.”

Now inverse matrices: that’s something that, if you use them in real life, you use a computer. I’d have sympathy if he wanted to skip those. (Though if you use them in real life, you would also be expected to go through the exercise by hand early on, so it’s not all “the magic box says the number is 3.46, and that’s all I understand.” If you want to apply things in new ways, you need a deeper understanding than “the magic box says.”)

Caulfield, I mean.

You use reciprocals to algebraically move parts of an equation from one side of the equal sign to the other. And Frazz & Caufield are wrong; calculators don’t help at the point in the process where reciprocals are used. @Richard S. R. the concept is introduced with 1/2 as the reciprocal of 2; but when you use it, it is 1/f(x) as the reciprocal of f(x).

Brilliant word play.

I remember that from grade school, but I had not thought of it since then until seeing today’s cartoon.

Total resistance in a parallel circuit is calculated as the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals of the various resistances in the circuit. In a series circuit, the total capacitance of the circuit is calculated the same way (1/(1/R1)(1/R2)(1/r…)) And of course, computers couldn’t do anything but add if we didn’t have reciprocals. I think Mr. Mallet is showing his Humanities Major biases here.

Carl R1947 Connant Report of Secondary Education: “Albert Einstein would not be permitted to teach high school algebra anywhere in the United States.” He didn’t have a teacher’s certificate. Yet I had a friend who had a course under him and said he was an excellent classroom teacher.

One of my favorite cartoons: A teacher addressing her young students. She asks, “Okay, who can tell me why it’s important to know stuff?” Youngsters need to understand that the more “stuff” you know, the more you can understand the world around you. The more you understand, the more empowered you become and the more you can enjoy life. Youngsters Caulfield’s age are too young to understand this and rebel against the teacher for taking them out of their comfort zones and making them learn new “stuff.”