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Joke About The Last Fifty Years of Math 1958-2008

February 20, 2008 by Ken Savage  

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math teacher

Last week I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58. The counter girl took my $2 and I was digging for my change when I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register.

I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help. While he tried to explain the transaction to her, she stood there and cried.

Why do I tell you this?

Because of the evolution in teaching math since the 1950’s:

  1. Teaching Math In 1950’s
    A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit ?
  2. Teaching Math In 1960’s
    A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100 His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?
  3. Teaching Math In 1970’s
    A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. Did he make a profit?
  4. Teaching Math In 1980’s
    A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
  5. Teaching Math In 1990’s
    A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? (There are no wrong answers, and if you feel like crying, it’s ok. )
  6. Teaching Math In 2008
    Un hachero vende una carretada de maderapara $100. El costo de la producciones es $80. Cuanto dinero ha hecho?

Comments

43 Comments on "Joke About The Last Fifty Years of Math 1958-2008"

  1. Erica Johnson on Fri, 29th Feb 2008 5:41 am 

    Ouch, that sucks for the cashier. Yea, mental math these days is kinda funny.

  2. Erin on Mon, 5th May 2008 10:25 am 

    This is hilarious. It’s funny because it’s true.

  3. Richard on Thu, 15th May 2008 2:19 am 

    Thanks for the joke Ken. I’m glad you don’t have a math question to prevent blog comment spam. ;) (otherwise I would have to have to ask for a manager and have a good cry)

  4. Joe on Thu, 15th May 2008 11:49 pm 

    Why is the last one in spanish? I don’t get it… unless it means the only people needing to count after 2007 are wetback cashiers? I guess I should get offended since I’m mexican but… whatever

  5. Alvaro on Fri, 16th May 2008 1:00 pm 

    Yeah, the correct phrase in spanish should be: “Un leñador vende un cargamento de madera por $100, su costo de producción es de $80, ¿cuánto dinero le ha quedado?”.

  6. Luis Garcia on Sat, 17th May 2008 6:53 pm 

    yeahh the spanish is totally wrong it makes no sence at alll!! good translation above..! :D goog luck next time

  7. KageTora on Sun, 18th May 2008 12:03 am 

    Actually happened to me today when I was out shopping. It came to £7.98, so I gave the (Indian) lady £11.08 to eliminate the pennies, and she stood there all confused and had to get her husband, even though the cash register does the calculations for you, and there was a calculator on the desk anyway. I ended up with £5.10 in change, even though two of them were trying to calculate it.

  8. Jimmy on Sun, 18th May 2008 5:17 pm 

    @KageTora I don’t get it? Why £11.08? Why not £10.08? Were you trying to confuse the poor lady? Or did you mean that you gave here £10, and then £1.08 in pennies and wondered why she couldn’t instantly figure it out?

  9. KageTora on Sun, 18th May 2008 7:09 pm 

    I wanted to get rid of some loose change and get the change back as 3 pound coins plus the 10p. In actual fact, I realised this morning that she’d actually got the price wrong, too, as it should have been £9.49 for what I bought. I bought three items and no combination of them with one taken out comes to £7.98, so I have no idea where this price came from.

  10. Max on Sun, 18th May 2008 8:56 pm 

    Wow…
    Not only have I heard that story a hundred times, I had 80s and 90s math. I’m not sure where the author’s kid goes, or where they got the idea about the math classes, but thats why everyone there is retarded. It happens all the time, everywhere. Even to me sometimes, and I do literally hundreds of calculations a hour (I’m a pilot).

  11. SOphia on Mon, 19th May 2008 3:07 am 

    truthiness!!! total and uder truthiness

  12. dawn on Wed, 21st May 2008 1:06 pm 

    Good to see the 2008 math is back to the math of the 60’s - a little more productive

  13. Charles on Thu, 22nd May 2008 3:55 am 

    A few years back I went to a Burger King, my total was just under $5 so I handed the girl a five dollar bill. She hit the $20 button on her register, the machine told her to give me over $15 in change and she started dutifully counting it out. I mean, mental math is one thing but if I hand you a 5, you can’t give three of them to me as change…and then she got confused when I tried to explain it to her. Oh, and I love the time line. I had my math in the 80’s and I can’t believe the crap I see coming home in my kids’ (6 and 8 years old) homework packets these days. It’s pretend math. Even my 13 year old doesn’t have what I would consider math anymore…*sigh* It’s easiest to just turn your head away from the schools and look towards the White House where everything make sense. ;-)

  14. Cloudmaster on Thu, 22nd May 2008 8:50 pm 

    Totally unrelated ( but I agree with the timeline) I was in my local corner shop a few years back (I’m in the U.K. BTW) and I’m not sure how we got on to the subject, but the teenager serving behind the counter thought that the USA had a King & Queen. Kids these days seem to be totally out of touch with the world.

  15. Ben Zyl on Fri, 23rd May 2008 12:16 pm 

    Just imagine the chaos if you had handed over a 2$ note, her head would have exploded.

  16. dan on Fri, 23rd May 2008 3:51 pm 

    old people are stupid and racist

  17. Teresa on Fri, 23rd May 2008 4:52 pm 

    So funny! I’m a teacher and this is so true! It’s a shame now a days! And the ending in Spanish was too funny!

  18. charles on Fri, 23rd May 2008 7:22 pm 

    if it wasnt so true it would be funny,now its just sad especialy the last part
    por que

  19. e-hero on Sat, 24th May 2008 3:24 pm 

    try looking at today’s history classes, they’re just as hard, plus there’s about twice as much of it as since you last picked up a book.

  20. tylor on Sat, 24th May 2008 9:44 pm 

    aren’t jokes supposed to be funny? and if you’re better at math than your 13 year old, get over yourself, you’re supposed to be.

  21. Rick on Mon, 26th May 2008 3:58 pm 

    Gallows humor is always the best!

  22. DaMan Conners on Mon, 26th May 2008 10:23 pm 

    I gave a real $2 bill to an idiot at Walmart and he insisted that it was fake. He needed to call over the manager even though the 3 people in line behind me all said it was real, yet he had never heard of a $2 bill. Kids today are just idiots thanks to our free public education that teaches them to not hurt the feelings of others rather than the skills needed to succeed. They do give us all lots of great comedic material.

  23. bob on Tue, 27th May 2008 2:14 am 

    Strange. My son is doing into algebra in his fourth grade class.

  24. Ben on Tue, 27th May 2008 5:36 am 

    I’m sorry but your complaint is ridiculous, plenty of kids are getting great math education, as a matter of fact more and more emphasis is being placed on teaching math over other subjects such as english or environmentalism (I’ve never had a math teacher like that have any of you?) Can you honestly expect a girl at BURGER KING to be systemic of american society? seriously, there have always been and will always be dumb people, don’t say everyone my age can’t do math because you couldn’t get your change for your curly fries.

  25. Summer on Wed, 28th May 2008 11:59 am 

    Alas, Stumbleupon.com… I was hoping this would be funnier than it was. It ended up being awkward mostly…

  26. Yaria on Wed, 28th May 2008 6:11 pm 

    @Ben

    Curly fries come from Arby’s, not Burger King.

  27. jaime on Thu, 29th May 2008 12:59 am 

    @Yaria
    You’re an idiot.

  28. mariana on Thu, 29th May 2008 4:32 am 

    it would be funnier and make more sense if the punchline actually had something to with education today. it really just seemed like a cheap shot at environmentalists and immigrants.

  29. "Wetback who can't count" on Thu, 29th May 2008 4:41 am 

    Wow, how racist is that this joke? I’m glad to see that there are still a lot of ignorant people around these days; I was so sure that we had rid ourselves of that kind of behavior in the late 60’s. I’m a First-Generation Mexican-American, 16 years no less, going to a private school on scholarship and yet I still come across this kind of idiocy. It’s okay though, sometimes being inferior is difficult to cope with, I understand.

  30. Summer on Thu, 29th May 2008 1:41 pm 

    Or Jack in the Box. :d

  31. Nick on Thu, 29th May 2008 4:20 pm 

    @Ben
    Teaching children to respect their environment is one thing. Calling it an acceptable replacement for basic mathematics is quite another.

    @dan and @”Wetback who can’t count”
    It’s not racist, and the author isn’t implying they can’t count. It’s a comment on the great “English vs. Spanish” language debate, particularly an issue in the southern United States.

    On the whole, as some have said before, sad but true.

    Oh, and - my goodness, people, it’s a JOKE. Get over it.

  32. KageTora on Thu, 29th May 2008 7:24 pm 

    I’m from the UK, a country where we can be proud to say that racial tensions have been kept at a minimum, which is more than we can say for most of our European neighbours. Only Holland and Sweden rival us in this respect. This is because Brits (and Dutch) love to joke about things (the Swedes just get drunk). I think making jokes about sensitive subjects helps to diffuse a problem before it develops into something nasty. Of course, there are jokes which should not be said, and there are times when they should not be said, but if people exercise common sense I don’t see how that would be a problem. I lived in Japan for ten years and got my fair share of racism from the local people - not every day, every week, or even every month was it in my face, but ignorance towards different ethnic groups was ever-present. You find this everywhere you go. I am from Liverpool, UK, and speak with an accent from there, yet when I travel 20 miles by train to Manchester I find people treating me like I don’t belong. Not everyone, and some people will even go the extra mile to help this ‘foreigner’, but some people won’t even give me the time of day. I feel safer in Manchester speaking with a London accent, which would get me in trouble in Liverpool!

    The joke has a nice, modernistic philosophical approach to it. It could have been told a bit better, but I thought it was good enough to write a comment. If you think it’s bad, don’t write a comment, unless it is seriously offensive.

    BTW, we in the UK don’t consider Hispanics to be a separate racial group. They are just another nationality of European, like us, a.k.a. Spanish. My brother has a Spanish wife and they have a daughter. No-one in UK has a problem with the Spanish.

  33. ben on Fri, 30th May 2008 1:53 am 

    @Kagetora

    I agree with your statement, we have to be able to poke fun at things if we are ever going to be able to move past them. The only difference between what is acceptable and unnaceptable is that an acceptable joke mocks a serious event but does so in a manner that doesn’t register a complaint about a historically oppressed group. in this case the joke about hispanics is bad because it casts them in a role of invaders who are responsible for making our math education even more retarded. while i have no problem with race jokes the fact is that when you fail to properly qualify a disparaging statement about an entire racial group returning to their historic homes (large areas of the west were originally under Mexican control) then you aren’t poking fun at a ridiculous aspect of our society, you are just further stratifying our culture by dividign us into “invaders” and “originals”.

  34. KageTora on Fri, 30th May 2008 2:50 am 

    The joke makes no reference to Hispanics as being ‘invaders’ and Americans as being ‘originals’. It just says it the way things are. Different peoples have been displacing each other for hundreds of thousands of years. Even us Brits weren’t the first people on the British Isles. The Picts were here before us, and probably someone was here before them.

    This conversation reminds me of a cartoon I saw of an American guy shouting “Go back home!” to a Chinese guy, then shouting “Go back home!” to a Hispanic guy, then being totally lost for words when confronted with a Native American chief.

    The joke in this thread, however, mentions nothing about sending people back to their ‘homes’. It just tells it like it is, these days.

  35. ben on Fri, 30th May 2008 7:34 am 

    @ kagetora
    look at it like this, the whole point of the joke is that it shows how our math education has been sliding downhill right? so the last example of math education must be the worst right? and given that the last example is in spanish and given that the reason we have ELL classes is because of hispanics, then it is safe to assume from this joke that hispanics are responsible for our horrible math education. not that i believe any of that.

  36. Yaria on Sat, 31st May 2008 2:26 am 

    Wow people… Do you really have to ruin it for others who just want to laugh?

    It was a joke, not some racist comment.

    And how am I an idiot for pointing out that Burger King doesn’t have curly fries?
    Just curious to hear the logic in that. :-)

  37. Tom on Sat, 31st May 2008 10:42 am 

    It’d be funnier if it wasn’t for the number of middle-aged people I’ve served in shops who can’t even count their change. I’d say that stupidity is timeless.

  38. j on Sat, 31st May 2008 8:05 pm 

    Another pathetic old fart longing for the good old days. Ahh , polio!

    Go back to the VFW and complain about the New Deal.

    How much aptitude do you really expect in your fast food worker anyway? I wouldn’t let my kid work there precisely because she IS good math and its a waste of her time.

    And how bright are you for eating that stuff?

  39. j 2 on Sun, 1st Jun 2008 3:53 pm 

    @j

    So its a waste of time to get a job that the she would excel at?

    @ other comments

    joke lighten up … It’s a shot though at the fact that the “Great Pride” of the US is being compromised to ever bend and be walked on

    flame if you want just remember one thing :

    “Fighting on the internet is just like the special Olympics: Even if you win YOU’RE STILL RETARDED”

  40. Pyxee on Mon, 2nd Jun 2008 4:07 am 

    @ben
    I don’t think that the joke is saying that Hispanic culture is responsible for the decline of math education. More likely the idea that the author was getting at, is that right now America as a whole is more concerned with making things more accessible to different minorities than they are about the actual content of what schools teach. Which is not a bad to an extent, but things are to a point where you almost have to speak Spanish to get that job at Burger King. I completely understand where you could get the idea that this joke is racist, but that just is not the case. I think people are just not used to seeing Spanish everywhere, and it hard for some people to get used to.

  41. Joshua on Fri, 6th Jun 2008 3:40 pm 

    One time I visited Burger King with my step-dad. We were in the drive through, and he said, “I’m gonna show you how stupid these people are.” We both ordered a coke. The bill was less than $5.00. He handed them a 20-dollar bill at the window, and said, “Give me back 3 fives, a ten, and 8 ones.” The lady gave us 3 fives and 8 ones, and we started to pull off. But she stopped us at the last minute. “Hey wait! … you forgot your other 10.

    True story. Now they use two windows to prevent this.

  42. Ridiculous on Sat, 14th Jun 2008 11:01 pm 

    This is just ridiculous. Today’s students are doing harder math at a younger age. If a student in the 50s decided to go to high school (many didn’t) he’d be doing the same math that today’s student does in the 5th grade. I’m so tired of hearing crap like this.

  43. salty on Tue, 22nd Jul 2008 1:28 am 

    Twas not a joke —- is in fact a very sad story of decayed education in our country….
    students of today are acquainted with technology, calculators and computers but sadly their brains are not analitacly cultivated…. If the machine quits or dies they are dead in the water.

    The spanish/mexican ending is sadly representative of our deterioriating English only country. And thus indicates the next chapter in the slide of education as ILLEGAL imigration takes its toll of our integrity and security.

    And sadly some of the comments posted are a window into this problem which could eventually slip the US of A into the status of a THIRD WORLD country. Many persons of the younger generations are not literate enough to appreciate what they enjoy or see it slipping away…
    GOD BLESS AMERICA —- LOVE IT OR LEAVE……………

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