Mathematical discipline
Posted by Abel on 16 Feb 2008 at 08:33 am | Tagged as: Perverting Reality
A friend recounts a tale of a University lecturer who made the members of his class memorise pi to some ridiculous number of decimal places. From time to time, he’d make the group recite the sequence, one digit each.
I’m picturing this rather differently, as a form of punishment drill. Should the maths class’s test results fall short of expectations, they would each be made to stand. The teacher would point to one student to start.
3
Said student would then sit. Her neighbour would continue:
point 1
She’d sit. The girls at the next desks would progress the sequence: 4, 1, 5…
The rules would be simple. Once all of the girls had recited their number correcty, the whole class would be seated and the lesson could resume. But should any girl fail, then all of those left standing would receive a taste of the tawse on each hand.
So much fairer, don’t you think, for the teacher to give them the chance to redeem themselves, rather than simply whacking them all for their poor performance?
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I sure that the girls in the first few places when reciting pye would find it a wonderful system, not so sure about the ones at the end of the line!
Perhaps the class could go one way for Pi and the other for Phi (golden mean 1.618…) That would balance things up.
As I was reading this another idea developed.
Instead of the standard
whack … 1 thankyou sir
whack … 2 thankyou sir
Make the girl recite pi in the same way, forcing her to concentrate.
whack …. 3 thankyou sir
whack … point 1 thankyou sir.
You decide before the spanking how many decimal places she will be spanked to and of course the punishment due if she makes an error.
Nathaniel
You missed out a stroke! Surely the ‘point’ deserves its own whack:
whack … 3 thank you sir
whack … point thank you sir.
whack … 1 thank you sir.
Oh dear am I to be punished