4
" Anyway.
I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you
have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back
of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing
on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises. "
― Jonathan Safran Foer , Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
8
" When I was a child, all problems had ended with a single word from my father. A smile from him was sunshine, his scowl a bolt of thunder. He was smart, and generous, and honorable without fail. He could exile a trespasser, check my math homework, and fix the leaky bathroom sink, all before dinner. For the longest time, I thought he was invincible. Above the petty problems that plagued normal people.
And now he was gone. "
― Rachel Vincent , Alpha (Shifters, #6)
11
" Hey you, dragging the halo-
how about a holiday in the islands of grief?
Tongue is the word I wish to have with you.
Your eyes are so blue they leak.
Your legs are longer than a prisoner's
last night on death row.
I'm filthier than the coal miner's bathtub
and nastier than the breath of Charles Bukowski.
You're a dirty little windshield.
I'm standing behind you on the subway,
hard as calculus. My breath
be sticking to your neck like graffiti.
I'm sitting opposite you in the bar,
waiting for you to uncross your boundaries.
I want to rip off your logic
and make passionate sense to you.
I want to ride in the swing of your hips.
My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks,
blazing your limbs into parts of speech.
But with me for a lover, you won't need
catastrophes. What attracted me in the first place
will ultimately make me resent you.
I'll start telling you lies,
and my lies will sparkle,
become the bad stars you chart your life by.
I'll stare at other women so blatantly
you'll hear my eyes peeling,
because sex with you is like Great Britain:
cold, groggy, and a little uptight.
Your bed is a big, soft calculator
where my problems multiply.
Your brain is a garage
I park my bullshit in, for free.
You're not really my new girlfriend,
just another flop sequel of the first one,
who was based on the true story of my mother.
You're so ugly I forgot how to spell.
I'll cheat on you like a ninth grade math test,
break your heart just for the sound it makes.
You're the 'this' we need to put an end to.
The more you apologize, the less I forgive you.
So how about it? "
― Jeffrey McDaniel
12
" I do feel that literature should be demystified. What I object to is what is happening in our era: literature is only something you get at school as an assignment. No one reads for fun, or to be subversive or to get turned on to something. It's just like doing math at school. I mean, how often do we sit down and do trigonometry for fun, to relax. I've thought about this, the domination of the literary arts by theory over the past 25 years -- which I detest -- and it's as if you have to be a critic to mediate between the author and the reader and that's utter crap. Literature can be great in all ways, but it's just entertainment like rock'n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn't capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn't work. Nothing else will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterisation, the structure, all that's irrelevant if you're not getting the reader on that level -- moving a story. If that's friendly to readers, I cop to it. "
― T. Coraghessan Boyle
14
" War crimes, you say?
No matter how many policies you put on paper, in reality, there are no rights and wrongs in war. War itself is a crime. War cannot be justified.
I believe, the only people, in this world, whose opinions matter, are the ones who go the extra mile to help other people expecting nothing in return.
Soldiers who fight fiercely for their country, the doctors in Sri Lanka's public hospitals attending to hundreds of patients at a time for no extra pay , the nuns who voluntarily teach English and math to children of refugee camps in the north, the monks who collect food to feed entire villages during crises, they are the people worth listening to, their opinion matters.
So find me one of them who will say: they wish the war didn't end in 2009, that they wish Sri Lanka was divided into two parts. Find me one of them who agrees with the international war crime allegations against Sri Lanka, and I will listen.
But I will not listen to the opinions of those who are paid to find faults in a war they were never a part of, a war they never experienced themselves. I will not listen to the opinions of those who watched the war on tv or read about it on the internet or were moved by a documentary on Al Jazeera.
The war is over. The damage is done. Let Sri Lanka move on. So our children will never have to see what we've seen. "
― Thisuri Wanniarachchi
16
" A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it's hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman -- or more likely a robot -- of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult.What a perverse fate for one of our kind's greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you're an adult you'll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we're talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe -- mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together -- beyond, around, and within us. It doesn't just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** -- as deep in us as any of our urges. "
17
" Teachers greatly influence how students perceive and approach struggle in the mathematics classroom. Even young students can learn to value struggle as an expected and natural part of learning, as demonstrated by the class motto of one first-grade math class: If you are not struggling, you are not learning. Teachers must accept that struggle is important to students' learning of mathematics, convey this message to students, and provide time for them to try to work through their uncertainties. Unfortunately, this may not be enough, since some students will still simply shut down in the face of frustration, proclaim, 'I don't know,' and give up. Dweck (2006) has shown that students with a fixed mindset--that is, those who believe that intelligence (especially math ability) is an innate trait--are more likely to give up when they encounter difficulties because they believe that learning mathematics should come naturally. By contrast, students with a growth mindset--that is, those who believe that intelligence can be developed through effort--are likely to persevere through a struggle because they see challenging work as an opportunity to learn and grow. "
20
" For the man on the street, science and math sound too and soulless. It is hard to appreciate their significance Most of us are just aware of Newton's apple trivia and Einstein's famous e mc2. Science, like philosophy, remains obscure and detached, playing role in our daily lives. There is a general perception that science is hard to grasp and has direct relevance to what we do. After all, how often do we discuss Dante or Descartes over dinner anyway? Some feel it to be too academic and leave it to the intellectuals or scientists to sort out while others feel that such topics are good only for academic debate. The great physicist, Rutherford, once quipped that, " i you can't explain a complex theory to a bartender, the theory not worth it" Well, it could be easier said than done (applications of tools "
