2IIM Wishes You A Happy Teachers’ Day!

On Teachers’ Day, we invited a few students to share what they thought were our quirks. I must say they went bang bang bang and picked out a set of fabulous routines. We have captured below a few snippets students had sent us through our Youtube Channel.

Happy Teachers’ Day!

In that spirit, I also thought I would share some famous jokes of math queries from students. A student apparently said that we could do 19/95 very easily, just cancel the 9 and we get 1/5. Awesome, isn’t it? Now, on to the more fun part. Try to find all pairs of distinct two-digit numbers where this works.

Math as religion

I was wondering how I could segue into this comic strip in this blog. Then I realized that I could just put the title “Math as religion” and Mr. Watterson will effortlessly handle the rest.

My favourite incident from class

One particular incident from class was profoundly funny and heart-breaking at the same time. A few years ago, I was trying to teach the idea of taking a non-terminating recurring decimal and arriving at the underlying rational number by doing some math to it.

I wrote down 0.a₁a₂a₁a₂a₁a_2……. and said I wanted to find the p/q that leads to this. I exhorted the students to think. Then I wrote down

X  =  0.a₁a₂a₁a₂a₁a_2…….

Treat this like an equation and see what you can do to both sides. Can we square both sides, can we divide both sides by 3, should we think of multiplying both sides by something?

I still did not get much. So, I prodded further and said what happens when we multiply both sides by 100? After a really long few seconds one student said we would get

Zero point a -hundred, a -2 hundred, a -hundred, a-2 hundred… and so on. In other words, the one student who had the courage to answer was thinking of the number 0.a₁₀₀a₂₀₀a₁₀₀a₂₀₀a₁₀₀a_200…….

It was funny and heart-breaking simultaneously. Our schools have made a real mess of math. Perhaps, with online learning becoming more prevalent we can ensure that all students are guaranteed basic math knowledge.

All teachers are important, good teachers are special; but only math teachers rule!

Best wishes for CAT preparation, do prepare with a smile.