The folk from Glee paid unintended homage to the title of this week’s episode (“A Night of Neglect”) by showing Mr. Schuester forgetting his basic math skills. Actually that’s not entirely true; he does math in his head correctly as he explains his plan to use salt-water taffy to earn money to go to Nationals in New York:
When I was a student here we paid for our entire trip to Nationals selling this…. So, to make $5000 at 25 cents apiece, we need to sell 20,000 pieces of taffy.
So far, so good. But wait, what’s that equation in the background?
Poor Will…he didn’t even notice that the equation wasn’t quite right (and neither did the four members of the Academic Decathalon team). But don’t worry, we understand how busy this time of year is, what with all the projects and end of the year assignments coming due. So shall we just fix that up for you?
There, all better. Now you can go concentrate on raising that money. Just be sure to have someone else in charge of the ledger.
360 
April 24, 2011 at 8:23 am |
They need the math equivalent of auto-tune.
August 3, 2011 at 10:27 am |
I have a question/favor to ask:
a long time ago, my math teacher showed us a “story” of a huge error in decimal rounding. I think it was about launching a rocket but a group of people used 5 decimal figures on their calculations and the other one used 3 decimal figures and the result of the calculations were catastrophically different… can anybody help on this?
September 7, 2011 at 2:34 am |
[…] asks the important questions, such as Why can’t people on Glee do math right? There’s more than one right answer to that question, I […]