Thursday, February 04, 2010

Daisy, who is in the 5th grade this year, recently learned the famous mnemonic for knowing which order to perform various mathematical operations in an equation. The mnemonic is: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, which stands for: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.

We reviewed this fact this evening (while discussing the mind-blowingness of trying to divide by zero) when Hank interrupted by asking about factorials, wondering if they fell before parentheses in the order of precedence.

Daisy: Nowhere! It's not "Please excuse my dear MMMHMMMM Aunt Sally."
Me: Huh? Were you just trying to say "Please excuse my dear fucking Aunt Sally?"
Hank: She was NOT!
Me: I think she was. I think she just bleeped herself. Daisy, did you just bleep yourself?
Daisy: Yep.
Hank: Well, at least SHE bleeped herself, which is more than SOME people did.
Me: Regardless, she didn't get it right. What you were asking is whether it should be, "Fucking, please excuse my dear Aunt Sally".
Hank: Would you STOP saying that around the baby?
Me: Oh, my bad. In my head I was bleeping myself.
Daisy: That's good enough, Mom. It's the thought that counts.

Math is fun.

4 comments:

Sister--Helen said...

This post was confusing to me...I had to read it twice...Talk nice around the Girl!

Anonymous said...

Please ask Hank at what age Daisy stops being "the baby."

(my baby just turned 30)

Ms.PhD said...

So funny! I love math jokes.

Mike said...

4th Sis, I'm ok with swearing around the kid, but I agree that I could have explained this dialogue better.

Bones, I think the answer will be "until I die".

Ms PhD, that's just like me, except substitute "obscene" for "math". Ok, I like math jokes too.