Freddogg Off The Chain

Angle/D x M/A= H/M x T/D

Philly 1960’s Catholic School obscene equation

I had a friend named Congruent Head but close friends called him S.A. S. for side/angle/ side. That and the above equation were the only uses for math I ever found. I firmly believe that students should be tested in seventh grade for aptitude in the engineering fields and all others should never take a class involving numbers except some consumer stuff and how to read a ruler. And real consumer stuff like annuities ,car insurance mortgages and shit like that, you will never fully comprehend just realize you are being ripped off then go about the business of being an Ugly American with three cars and a color t.v in every room and maybe one in your car as well.

I am sure that 95 percent of American college graduates could never given a 100 years cut rafters on a pitched roof where one pitch meets another different pitch. A carpenter told me the hardest thing to make is a box that if you can make a box you can make anything. I told him I wouldn’t know because I can’t make no box but I can write creatively.

Back before computers schools used to spend hours teaching Special students fraction functions with no practical application to the life they lived. I once gave this large muscular Big Black Mike wrestler dude 10 fractions to divide.

Mike hated school but he liked me all right. And he was smart as in street smart which is a lot more practical than book smart or irrelevance smart.

Mike kind of threw his answers back in my face and I said. ”The bad news is there all wrong the good news is you made the same mistake on every problem.”

Mike just glared waiting for an explanation.

“You see in division you’re supposed to invert the second fraction before you multiply top to top and bottom to bottom.”

Mike glared some more. “Invert, you know, turn upside down or back around depends on how you like to say it.”

“White people are always trying to get over on somebody,” Mike said. ‘If it was supposed to be turned back around why didn’t you fucking do it?”

Euclid—the truck and the man- Ptolemy and Pythagoras and his gay brother Pyfagoras- all have their earth shattering theories and I’ve never used one because they have no practical place in my life.

I used to challenge my students in psychology and tell them that math in high school was a waste of time and that no one needed to understand the process leading to an answer with no practical relevance when you could get the same answer by punching numbers into a calculator.

I don’t understand electricity but I do know that when I turn on the switch the light comes on most of the time. That is all I need to know along with the don’t throw the radio in an occupied hot tub.

And math doesn’t exercise the brain because the brain is not a muscle which is why it doesn’t atrophy inside your skull.

Some one tell me where Algebra 1 turns into Algebra 2 then go tell the checker at Food Lion who will scan and scan the bar code until the frozen fish sticks beep.

Remember adding the square of the sides of a right triangle will give you the hypotenuse squared and I’m so happy about that because now I know the meaning of life which is—it doesn’t matter—none of it!


Peace Professor Freddogg