Weapons of Math Instruction

Searching around the web lately, I've found some articles that never fails to make me laugh - even if the topic has never been a best friend of mine. Well, at least someone made an effort.

See how some wise-crack put a spin on math:

HEADLINE: WEAPONS OF MATH INSTRUCTION SEIZED


At New York’s Kennedy airport today, a person later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a drafting triangle, a compass, and a calculator.

During a press conference the Attorney General said he believed the man was a member of the notorious al-Gebra movement and the FBI intends to charge him with transporting weapons of math instruction.

“Al-Gebra is a fear-sum, transverse cult,” the Attorney General said. “As a group they seek means of average solutions by extremes, and sometimes randomly go off on tangents in search of absolute values. A member of al-Gebra may use acute alias such as ‘x’ or ‘y’ and refer to himself as an unknown identity, but we have determined that he is likely to belong to a common denominator — the axis of medieval that coordinates in every country.” The Attorney General continued, “Al-Gebra functions as a bunch of standard deviations that have been tribal since the time of Noah’s arc,” a remark that struck a chord with the media. “They are inordinate in terrorism, of that I’m abscissaly sure.

They use degrees of irrational subtrahend to create differences and conditional inequalities among friendly, discriminant nations, leading to arguments and making us less functional and coefficient in attaining our goals. And they have the international mobility of a swarm of loci. Give them an air matrix to inflate and a plot to set it on, and they can live anywhere. If necessary, we will pursue them to the corners of this Earthly sphere.”

He complemented this with the supplementary remark, “As the Greek philanderer Isosceles once said, ‘Never forget that there are three sides to every triangle, and sometimes two of them are normal.’ ” The Attorney General added, “As you can tell, I am not diagonally opposed to that prime concept.”

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush obtusely said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes. Next to bisectual marriages and those polygonists in Utah, I’m concerned about the significant places of such weapons. Tomorrow I intend to go to the hill and address Congruence about this situation. I have a volume of suggestions and a finite series of common solutions for them to consider.”

The President also warned, “These weapons of math instruction are without parallel and have the potential to decimal everything on a scalene never before seen unless we become exponents of an infinity Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of kindness. If we enter a phase in which all nations are integrated in all degrees of purpose, that steady state will give us slope for a better tomorrow, and we will all be infinitely better off. In such a case we could have our pi and eat it too.”

The President further declared, “I am gratified that we have been given a sine that al-Gebra is protracting this situation with calculusing disregard. Their murky statisticians plan to inflict plane of new dimensions on every sphere of influence,” he added. “Under these circumferences, we must differentiate their roots, make our points, draw our lines, and proportionally intersect these people throughout whatever area of the domain they range. And, above all, we must make sure that they can’t get their hands on radii active materials. That is one thing you can secant you? What we need is a higher quotient of linguists embedded with our troops so that they can interpolate the gibberish that al-Gebra uses to communicate. If we had that capability, we could periodically reach new limits of success as easily as falling off a natural log. Anything short of that could lead to some real, not imaginary, complex circumstances.”

The Secretary of Homeland Security added, “As our Great Leader would say, ‘Read my ellipse.’ The one angle that I am uncertainty of is that although al-Gebra will probability try to continuously multiply in theorem, their days are numbered as we draw the hypotenuse ever tighter around their necks.”

Procrastinating? Here’s How To Cure It

We’ve all had our bouts of procrastination, that moment in time that we just want to do our the work later. Most of us can get over it and make up for the slack. The problem here is with the others that chronically fall into this practice.

Now that’s the bad news.

Chronic procrastination is not just a bane for business, it is also a bane in all the things we do. Those who suffer from it practically puts everything off on a later date. More often than not, nothing ever happens to them. Dishes pile up in the sink, the grass grows too high, gas run to empty, phone bills unpaid, etc. are just some of the things chronic procrastinators commit.

While it’s true that seeking professional help works, nothing beats having that internal resolve to actually get moving. If you think you are suffering from chronic procrastination, or probably just want to improve your productivity, you can try doing these four simple tips to beat it:

1.     Narrow down your focus – one of the biggest reasons we put off our work is because of our perception of size. Sometimes, looking at the big picture can so overwhelm us that we end up not doing the job anymore.

To make it easier, break the task down into individual parts. Start with the task that is easiest to do. Put a time limit for its completion. Before you know it, you’ve done your work.

2.     Reward yourself – every time you complete a task, especially the ones you hate the most, reward yourself with something you enjoy. This will give you more incentive to do your work harder, so that you can reap more personal rewards.

Also, you do not have to be perfect. As long as you accomplish a majority of your task, consider it a success.

3.     Be accountable to others – have someone monitor your work, or maybe give an announcement of what you seek to accomplish. This will give you more impetus to finish your work, since all eyes would be upon you now.

4.     Keep up your work – just like the laws of physics, anything in motion will stay in motion. It is the same way with work, or even life. Once you have started something, make sure that you keep on going until you reach your goal.

(Credits to Nadia Goodman’s article from Entrepreneur.com)

Do’s And Don’ts In Writing A Resume

For the job seekers among us, it is important to write the perfect resume. Yes, you may not be able to write perfectly, but you should at least do something that approaches perfection. And that means knowing what to put and what not to put in your resumes.

So, what should you remember?

The Good:

-          Write your job experience in reverse chronological order (that includes your current/last job). It’s up to you if you want to leave your short, irrelevant jobs, but it also depends on who you are applying to.

-          Put your education record to the end of the page. Unless you are a new grad, what you studied or majored in doesn’t really matter in the eyes of the recruiter.

-          Quantify your accomplishments. Instead of ‘managed a department’, why not say ‘managed a department of 20 auditors’. That not only puts a specific number down, it also adds credence to your management skills.

-          Identify your strengths. What are your strongest skills or assets, the things you usually do in all the jobs you’ve done? Put that into your resume as well.

-          Write your description of each skill or accomplishment you made. It doesn’t matter if it is in bullets, full sentences, or snippets. Just be consistent with all of them.

The Bad:

-          Paragraphs. Frankly speaking, no one reads full paragraphs anymore, including the HR staff. If you want to get their attention, minimize paragraphs and go straight to the point.

-          Ambiguity of job titles. Recruiters hate guesswork. If you do have a strange-sounding company title, don’t forget to add a description to it (e.g. Social Marketing Diva – Social Media Marketing Specialist).

-          Information overload. Leave out extraneous facts. Birth dates, religion, hobbies, weight, social security number, marital status, links to Facebook pages or personal blogs, names of children, sexual orientation or life mission statements, leave them out. Really. No one needs or wants to read that in the recruitment office.

-          Lazy proof-reading. Grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, consistency, etc.  are the banes of resumes. Read your work, read it again, have your friends, sister, or even a teacher look over your work. Make sure your resume is free from mistakes.