Don't know much of anything, really

Don't know much trigonometry
Don't know much about algebra
Don't know what a slide rule is for
--- Sam Cooke, "Wonderful World"

Math Methods was interesting. We took a sort-of practice test, but in a group. I was with, along with two others, S, my (fundamentalist) classmate from Science Methods as well. It was appalling; she's the most innumerate person I have ever met. This college student, who is studying to be a teacher, does not know her single-digit times tables. I'm not kidding --- she literally does not know what 6 * 7 or 4 * 8 are. She is ignorant of how to find the area of a triangle or rectangle. And the worst part is, we've been in this math class for four months now. Supposedly, these ridiculously basic math concepts, which ought to be fourth-grade material, should have been refreshed in everyone's minds by now. And yet, S does not know these things. She cannot understand relationships between lists of numbers. She cannot construct a table of ordered pairs representing days to weeks. She cannot follow the simple analogy 1:12 :: inch:foot. She cannot tell when a list of numbers has a set of common factors. Shocking. As Spooky said, utterly unacceptable. Yet she is getting an A in the class. How is this possible?

She worked herself into a dramatic state, nearly to the point of tears, after class. She said I was mean to her because I told her not to just blindly copy my answers, that I would explain them so that on the second part of the test she'd at least have a bit of a grasp of the concepts behind the answers. I was standing with T --- S had asked us both to wait for her, for some reason --- and when S started going on about all this, T just walked off. S tried to drag us into her meltdown, but T kept going. Out in the parking lot, T explained to be that she never lets people bring her into their drama. She just says, "okay," and walks away.

Food for thought.

Spooky was supposed to come over tonight, but she had a pain episode because of the fluid in her lower cavity, and couldn't come. I stopped by to see her after work. She told me that she'd talked with Babydaddy about my concerns with how I felt like an intruder, and Babydaddy replied, "It's not my job to like him."

Oh, the drama.

So I drove to the Hangout by myself. The Friar was not there, but the father of one of The Job's babies was playing. It was pretty good. I played some video games with the fry cook, drank some alcohol and left.