Pi

I was at Winnie's house on the weekend and lots of funny things happened, but I regret to inform you that that blog post is going to have to wait because something far more urgent has come up.

Let me write you a direct quote from the math book from which I teach. "The exact value of pi is 22/7." I obviously threw a fit. I mean, they could have said, "you know what, don't worry about what it really is because you don't have calculators, but we'll ball park it at 22/7" or even, "pi is almost 22/7." But no, they had to go out there and drop the e-bomb. Exact.

Now, I get it. They don't have calculators and its easier to give them fractions. I didn't say anything when they looked up square roots to two decimal places in a table. I shed not a tear when the physics text book depicted wave graphs as little rounded cones, because they hadn't learned the sine graph yet. But this. This is too much for anyone.

In class today I called that line in the textbook wrong, absurd, evil, perplexing, silly, imaginative, and untrue. I encouraged them to scratch out the word exact. Then at five minute intervals I could interrupt my own lesson to say, "who knows the exact value of pi?" and they would shout out, "NOBODY!" and then we would carry on. I think I will have to write a strongly worded letter to the authors and publishers of this textbook.