Simple Math

When I was in school, I hated math on the days we had to tackle story problems.  Things like: If four guys go golfing at a course thirty minutes from their home, have an 8:00 a.m. tee time and they each get a hole in one during the round, what time will they get home?  

There’re too many variables.  Are they on a high school golf team and their coach is driving the team bus?  Are they four twenty-somethings more interested in celebrating their holes in one than heading back to their shared apartment?  Or are they four happily married guys anxious to share the news with their wives?

The truth of the matter is each life holds a series of math problems. How much money do I make?  How much do I spend?  Can I afford to go to college and, if so, how will tuition and fees impact my choice? How will where I live impact my budget?  How much does it cost to have a child?  And on and on.  Our personal story problems appear to be endless.

Another math concept is the six degrees of separation.  Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of “friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.

And then there’s simple math.  You know the kind that seemed endless in your elementary school math book.  Page after page of problems designed for practice.  The problem with that kind of practice is you had to master simple math: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  If you didn’t, you produced pages and pages of mistakes.  More importantly, these errors were getting locked into your brain. That my friend, is why calculators were invented.

If you know how to use a calculator and have a little bit of logic, you can solve most of your mundane math issues.  Logic enters in because the calculator spits out information built around the numbers we enter.  If we aren’t accurate, it won’t be.

When I was school superintended my business manager bolted into my office to tell me we had a problem.  While she was running the monthly financial report for an upcoming school board meeting, she discovered we’d overspent our budget by $1,000,000. I asked her to run a copy of the spreadsheet so I could take a look.  Within about five minutes I discovered the error.  She had entered $1,000,000 as the cost of a mop we’d purchased.  It should have been $10. She leaned on the zero key while entering the data.  Problem solved.

I shared my son-in-law, Sutton’s, latest song, “The Ghost Perfume” in my last blog.  I asked you to share it with others and some of you have.  Since that post I’ve developed a second request.  It’s a combination of simple math (multiplication), six degrees of separation, and our – yours and my – social media presence.

I’ve seen numerous Facebook requests that speak to the fact that someone’s turning 100 and would you “please post a happy birthday notice or send a card to celebrate the occasion”.  They hoped to get a hundred shares for the birthday boy.  Teachers use the sharing technique to demonstrate to their students how fast a simple message can be shared around the world.   And now, here’s mine.

If you copy the link to “The Ghost Perfume” and share it through your email account, or your social media presence, and ask those who receive it to do the same, this thing will blow up. If only twenty people follow through at each level, the results will still be spectacular because simple math says 20 by 20 by 20 by 20 by 20 by 20 = 64,000,000.  And if by chance, we push it to a seventh share by 20, a sixth of the world’s 7,500,000,000 people will have heard this song.

Please copy and paste.  Let the sharing begin.