On the Other Hand...

Left Handed Student

The classroom was designed to hold 24 students. We don’t count the teacher or his desk, yes, his desk. He taught high school math. This was not the brainy class, just your basic, shall we call it math for non-math majors? Most of these young people would not be taking the SATs. They would find jobs, right after graduation.

His job, as he saw it, was to help them balance a check book and plan to live on a budget. His classroom had 24 desks for 24 students. While at that time in history there was no particular sensitivity to what we call politically correct, the chairs seemed to be ahead of their time. They served all who would sit in them without bias. The only consideration that those who ordered student desks had was in having the correct percentage of left and right desks. It was a math problem. It was a real-life math problem.

If the general population is half male and female and if a greater percentage of males are left hand dominant, how many left-hand desks should you order for a classroom of 24 students? Just tossing out numbers, the general population is estimated to have between 8% and 15% who write with their left hands. Of the 24 students it might be expected there would be a need of between 1.62 and 3.6 left-handed desks. So, do we round up or down? Each school year he began his math lessons with the same problem.

Each school year the statistical expectations never matched the smiling faces in his classroom. He taught six classes. The desks remained constant. Some students who took notes with their right hands had to sit at a left-handed desk and vice versa. In the real world the sample rarely fits the statistical expectation. Like a final puzzle piece, you have to turn it just right before it fits into its slot.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter

Image
  Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter,   How They Happened, Where They are Located, Why They Went Unnoted for More than Fifty Years, and How They May be Understood and Put to Use By Sandy Kinnee and Lauren Kinnee, Ph.D. Once You See the Drips You will Always See them PART 2 Jackson Pollock’s Stray Drips (Over-Splatter): Their origins and implications   Abstract   This paper proposes a wholly new method for reconstructing the chronology of Jackson Pollock's oeuvre based on the presence of drips of stray pigment on otherwise cohesive canvases.  Pollock, after having finished a painting and let it dry, moved it to the side in his studio where it occasionally accumulated drips and other marks that were the byproduct of his working method.  These marks, here termed ‘over-splatter,’ are present on both recto and verso of many Pollocks in major museums.  Lavender Mist of 1950, for example, has a large and distinctive red splotch on the front, right s...
Read more

The Mummy's Curse and the Armani Suit

Image
    There’s a reason it’s called rag paper.   For centuries, ragpickers supplied the papermaking industry with cotton and linen. Discarded clothing scraps were the aluminum cans of the past. They provided a livelihood to the unskilled. At the dawn of the Industrial Age, everything changed. A rising bourgeoisie and the success of education lead to increasing demand for printed material. The impact upon paper and the rag   supply chain was unanticipated. Consumption of traditional cotton and linen scraps outstripped supply.   The price of rags rose. When demand for papermaking material exceeded supply, alternate sources were sought.    One long forgotten trove of very, very old rags was rediscovered in the 1800s: linen wrapped Egyptian mummies. A Maine papermill owner imported a boatload of them and removed the linen wrappings. The linen was then converted into pulp with the end product being butcher wrap.   Production of the brown   ...
Read more

Isamu Noguchi and His Nisei Muse

Image
Noguchi Doing Time While it is true that at Poston Isamu Noguchi was neither fish nor fowl not fully Japanese and was in the internment camp voluntarily None of those who had reason to not want him around had the authority to release him He was a perpetual outsider Much like Pollock was portrayed as a cowboy but was anything but Except for Jackson's drinking Two artists doing time in ill-fitting Pigeonholes The book tells the story of Isamu Noguchi's girlfriend and muse during his time in the Poston Internment Camp, located in the Arazona desert where she inspired his famous lamps. CLICK HERE TO BE TAKEN TO THE FULL PREVIEW OF THE BOOK. The book is a limited edition of fifty copies.
Read more