“Okay, show me the birds,” I’ll say whenever someone important is being escorted down the prison school corridor. “Palms out, away from your face, birds touching.”
Most of the inmates know the exercise. From thumbs to pinkies, each digit represents the numbers six through ten, respectively. I write “8 x 8” on the board, just in case someone has forgotten.
“Your birds are eights,” I’ll remind them. “Birds on down count as ten each, so how much do you have?”
By now I’ll have lost most of them. A few might understand. As for you, smart-reader-that-you-are, it’s easier than a game of twister in prison (not something you’d want to partake in). “Sixty,” you should have figured out by now.
“Okay, how many fingers are above the birds?”
Again, if you’re sitting at your computer doing this exercise, or looking at the picture, you’ll notice two fingers above the left bird and two fingers above the right bird.
“What’s 2 x 2?” I’ll ask.
“Four.”
“Put it all together and what do you have?”
“Sixty plus four, umm, ehhh, … sixty-four.”
And who says blogging can’t be educational? Watch the video below for more instruction.
6 comments:
OK, Crowbar, how many 14s equals what?
Coolie. Who needs New Math and the Metric system after this?
-- Counting Crows again.
Ma and Pa went to DPS. Your little birdie lesson had me seeing nothing but Pa's math perfectly clear.
I never realized that I wasn't smart enough to go to prison.
JR-I am a total zero with numbers. However, I can figure out percentages on a sale item very quickly...
I have been so poor at maths that when I come across such problems my mind is numbness X ten raised to the power infinity...
Jim, Like that video on Math?? --Bro, Ron
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