Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for October 11, 2022

The whole point of a mystery is to solve it.

Let the teacher solve the mystery instead.

Calvin said the name of a video game that he’ll definitely love! Except it has a “C” instead of “K”.

If i don’t, then someone else will. As a society we would have solved it – wonderful!

So, again he cons himself into a ‘logical’ position as to why he shouldn’t do his math homework!!

As a licensed (although not practicing) mathematician, I’ve always been annoyed by the folks who confuse mere arithmetic with actual mathematics. Arithmetic is boring. Mathematics is FULL of interesting theorems and problems. Like a proof of the four color theorem or the Collatz conjecture, for instance.

(There have actually been a proofs of the four color theorem. For extra credit, find and understand one of them!)

I didn’t mind doing math… as long as teachers let me do it my own way. Why do you have to solve it a certain way if one way or the other ends in the same result?

There’s a TV show that teases you with answers they know are wrong before telling you they don’t know either!

Calvin, the little master of rationalization.

No one has mentioned that Calvin has compared Math to Mystery before and that led to a one-week Tracer Bullet story arc.

Let’s see Calvin try to use that lame excuse on Miss Wormwood!!

It’ll be straight to the principal’s office!!

Y’know, I have to wonder why there have been no parent/teacher conferences regarding Calvin’s poor school performance.

For a few of us, practical math was something we used and enjoyed every day. Racing up the multiplication tables was a fun challenge. Algebra became a tangle a few months in. Plane geometry was more useful and understandable when applied to practical projects. For anything beyond those, counting the stars was easier.

My husband thinks math is truth and light.

And I know that’s not right.

Math is evil. Algebra II & Trig was my high school bane. I’m practically having a PTSD episode just typing this sentence remembering it! For years at my work desk I had a sign: And then Satan said: Let’s put the alphabet in math.

Savor the mystery and fail the class…

I don’t think your teacher or your parents would see it that way…

Why the heck didn’t I think of that all those years ago!?

Any excuse not to do the math.

I heard once that math is the basis of art. The symmetry, or asymmetry, is what appeals to people. As for me, I got a paint by the numbers kit and never got past 5.

Wait till Calvin sees the savagery of Division. Oh, the horror.

Calvin comes up with some of the most ingenious and oftentimes, warped reasoning and logic for not wanting to do his homework! Which also boils over into his classwork!

The memory of “word problems” in math makes me cringe to this day.

You wouldn’t be using this logic if you were watching TV.

All he has to do is write that E=MC squared was first thought of by C3PO and proven by R2D2

I liked the idea of math as mystery, I just wrote the answers to math problems next to the question.

The mystery was for the teacher as to how I got there.

They never found out, if they called me to the blackboard and chalked up a problem, I just wrote the answer as soon as they handed me the chalk.

I took a trig course in college after never having had it in high school, so I went into the class knowing nothing about trigonometry. I came out of the class ten weeks later knowing nothing about trigonometry. It was a complete waste of my time. Oh wait…I did get this much from it….

Sine: something that sticks out of the ground on street corners.

Cosine: Something you do on mortgage applications.

Tangent: Something I go off on in conversations.

Fast forward a few years: I became an engineer. Go figure.

Calvin’s desire to rationalize not doing homework is ceaseless.

Ok J.J. Abrams

Look at it this way, Cal; Two numbers go into a Transmogrifier together, can you work out what will come out the other end? ☺

Calvin’s imagination and logic never fails to amaze me- nor does it Hobbes.

And here’s the evidence that Bill Watterson experimented with psilocybin back in the 80’s…

I like math… it has actual answers

As a young man I used to savor the mystery of how beautiful women would look without their clothes; the arrival of computers and the Web has enabled unlimited access to answer{s} for both math problems and anatomy; not necessarily a good thing. Sigh.

Indication #47 that Calvin will grow up to be a writer.

In real life, such things tend to become suddenly important, and then solved, upon receiving one’s first paycheck.

" ……it’s meant to explode. Do you know what your doing? Your preventing the bomb from ‘becoming’ ! " Howard Payne, ‘Speed’ Solve the puzzle. Do your homework, Calvin. Prevent the ‘bomb’, ie ANOTHER trip to the principal, and ANOTHER letter home, from ‘becoming’ .

That does sound like an interesting way of looking at it. However, I also think it would make finding the solution even more satisfying.

Heard in Japan, teacher would put up only the solution, students would be graded on the level of artistry they employed to come to the solution..

I hated story problems… until I learned how to decode English and put it into a mathematical equation.Now I love story problems, and math in general. It’s a way to use abstract thinking to better understand the world and improve your life.

Higher degree equations have more than one root.

Without mystery there would be no fear, because everything would be known.

Reinventing the wheel is my method of learning. An improvement from the Just Try Stuff approach.

Didn’t know there was so much violence in math. Who knew?

And they do more harebrained things with math nowadays.

Calvin’s clearly a humanities major.