CowPi Journal

If Only I Knew…

14 December 2004, 3 pm | Jocularity, Math

Imagine yourself in a high school honors algebra two class. The intellectual who’s who of your grade is in this class.

Imagine further, the teacher, who in an effort to help his students around one particularly tricky question, gives a hint to an answer on the test. He says, “For problem number twenty two, I WONder what could be in the numerator,” with heavy emphasis on the sound of one in wonder.

The proverbial “ditzy blond” within the class, a student who happens to be a cheerleader and one of the most intelligent people in the classroom, blurts out before thinking, “That would seem to help if I only knew where the numerator was…”