Oleg's Big Party

Now the question goes like this:

Simplify x^2/x^3. (In case you are a complete nutjob or have a number neurons equal to the largest even prime number, I shall give the answer at the end of my entry.)

Okay. Now we have about enough information to give a short summary of my experiences at my job. Of course, I haven’t yet told you what my job is, so maybe you don’t really have enough information after all. I help tutor mathematics at a math support center for MATH111: Calculus I (or whatever they call it) Thursday evenings. In case you are curious, the topics start with continuity and limits and end with the integral version of the power rule.

So, as a tutor, you would expect that I would see a lot of people who need help with calculus - fair enough, that sounds reasonable to me. But here lies the great big problem for me. It’s pretty difficult to teach calculus when people don’t know exponent laws or that when you square a number the result is always positive. When was the last time you saw someone use a TI-89 to factor (x^2 - 2x + 1) or to graph y = 1/x? Yes, my friends, this is what I see every time while tutoring. Painful? You bet.

So here is my question, and I raise it rhetorically, though perhaps you may be able to answer it. Even as the reject Ivy (everyone I know at Cornell was rejected at another Ivy League school, with the exception of the engineers, who are all MIT and/or Stanford rejects), you should be able to assume some level of mathematical competency in all the students. Not knowing how to simplify x^2/x^3 is simply pathetic. What are all these ‘people’ doing here at Cornell, an Ivy League institution? (No Cornell jokes, please - I insult the school myself enough. And besides unless you’ve come to the hellhole that is Ithaca, you really don’t have a right to complain or criticize. Don’t get me wrong, Cornell is an awesome place to study and research - more on that at a later time, perhaps.)

Now, I will make a somewhat flimsier assumption that the regular readers of Oleg’s Big Party know something about programming. In most languages, it is common practice that to assign a variable a value, you type something of the following form:

variable = value

I am in the Introduction to Computer Programming course (as a requirement for a math major). Several lectures ago, we spent about thirty minutes explaining why

i = i + 1 %i is a variable

was a valid statement for MatLab (and various other programming languages as well, though you may prefer i++). Apparently to most people, the boolean equals operation (==) is the same as the assignment equals (=). I don’t know about you, but I count two characters in the former and one in the latter. Computer Science class would be so much nicer in the afternoon for me; after all, it’s pretty hard to take a nap at 9:05 in the morning.

So my point? Standards are low. I must come off as sounding pretentious, stuck up, and intellectually snobby. If you think that, bite me.

(Oh, and as I promised, the answer is x^(-1) or 1/x)