I pushed the wonky-wheeled cart around the office supplies store and stubbed my toe. Again. I've lost track of how many trips this latest one makes, though I could count the years and multiply by two. Each trip extracting a little more blood.
The boy's list is simple, still.
Pencils, paper, notebooks. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Her list, however, is explicit. And she, like all peers in her age group, is loathe to deviate from its parameters.
In addition to the ream of paper and horde of pencils she could lash together into a raft with the laces she's removed from all her shoes (it's not a style-thing she assures me), she also requires tissues and paper towels and ball point pens that don't leak.
She will need folders and page tabs and correction fluid. Highlighters and permanent markers and one's that will erase with a dry cloth.
She selects each item as if it were a cog in a machine.
The color-coded notebooks and binders I'm sure I bought last year are somehow all wrong for this year's scholarly pursuits. Too thin. They must be replaced with larger examples.
As too will the calculator required for last year's honors math, be traded for a more expensive version, which she assures me will last her through high school. How clever that the $99 graphing calculator comes in jewel tones.
"My brother can have my old one," she says with all the graciousness of a girl who never gets her supplies second hand or chooses drab colors.
Who am I to judge the function or fashion? I'm just the one wielding the plastic card to pay for it all. Sadly, the store is out of models colored black or dark gray.
"It's really worth the investment," she coos, hinting at all the calculations she will make with her turquoise-colored device. "Look. It's even rechargeable."
I laugh.
Just the other day I'd been busy staring off into my phone, pretending the last-minute rush of back-to-school spending was a deluge I could avoid when a story popped up from 3,700-year-old Babylonia.
It seems a recent study of a device discovered near the turn of the 20th century -- a pressed-clay tablet known as Plimpton 322 -- contains hints on figuring out complex trigonometry problems three-thousand years ahead of its time. And it has some mathematicians wondering if the ancient calculator could have lessons for modern day students since its calculations use ratios rather than angles.
Of course, it has others wondering what's the agenda?
To sell some other theory? Creating solutions to problems that don't really exist?
This isn't really new.
We're always trying to reinvent the wheel, aren't we?
When mathematicians fight, apparently, you get a knock-down-drag-out over whether base 60 is better than base 10.
When mother and daughter fight it's over whether a fancy new cerulean graphing calculator is better than last year's gray one. ... or even a sand-colored lump of clay from centuries ago.
I know which one of us will win.
The only question remaining is whether this pretty device will become a hand-me-down or a relic.
Time will tell.
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