Welcome to the jungle
Let’s file this one under the heading of “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
I’m working my way through a lecture series titled “The United States in the Middle East: 1914 to 9/11″ by Prof. Salim Yaqub of the University of California at Santa Barbara.
(Shameless plug here, I bought this from The Teaching Company, a concern that was founded by someone who is making money after realizing there are lots of us out there who want to catch up on all those lectures we dozed through or blew off in college.)
(I was going to say I hate this person. But what I really hate is the fact I didn’t think up this idea first.)
Anyway, under the “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry” heading is this bit:
“A fourth-grade mathematics primer published in the 1980s contained the following word problems:
“The Mujaheen are on the Path of God in an attack on a convoy of the interventionist Russians and Communists. After most of the enemy are killed, 500 boxes of shells are seized as booty. If, in every box, there are 820 shells, how many shells are seized as booty?”
“Here’s another one.
“The speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 500 meters per second. If one Russian is at a distance of 3,200 meters from a Mujaheen, and the Mujanheen aims at the Russian’s forehead, calculate how many seconds it will take until the bullet hits the Russian in the forehead.”
“So that’s a fourth-grade primer.
“Due to the shortage of school materials the textbook from which these questions were drawn remained in use long after the Soviets had withdrawn from the country. Indeed, it had been in use as late as the year 2000.”
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