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The text for the recent Spiked Math comic:
Popular Math Fad Hits the West Coast
Reported by David Jones
SALINAS, Calif – This season’s hottest fad is ‘mind calculating’, a fad inspired by 12-year-old Alex Courant, a student at North York Elementary School. For those of you who still don’t know, ‘mind calculating’ is when a person performs complicated arithmetic problems in their head, WITHOUT the use of a calculator!
“Yeah, I been ‘mind calculating’ since like, five months ago man,” the 12-year-old Courant told reporters Thursday. “Of course all of the other kids in my school started ‘mind calculating’ right after I started.”
However, not everyone is happy with the new fad. Mathematics teacher Judy Smith told us, “The school has just recently spent thousands of dollars on brand new Casio FX-9860GII’s and now they are going to waste. I don’t care if kids ‘mind calculate’ in their free time, but when they are in my classroom they damn well better be using those Casios!”
How could something so simple become so popular? Some say that students are sick of teachers forcing a complicated calculator with tons of buttons upon them. In fact, 6-year-old Amanda Person asks, “why can’t the calculator they give us have one button like those Apple products? This thing has like 50 buttons and is difficult to use.”
Regardless of what teachers may think, it seems this fad isn’t going away any time soon.
😛 😳 😕