Ask-A-Nerd

I work as a math tutor at a local community college. Today at work I had my most unusual request to date. Now, as a mom I'm quite familiar with the "Ask-a-Nurse" concept whereby after-hours non-emergency medical questions are fielded to an RN who helps panicked parents and other hypochondriacs. Today, however, was my first foray into the newly emerging field of "Ask-a-Nerd" whereby panicked college students phone math tutors with impossible-to-answer-over-the-phone math questions. Actually, I think I did a pretty fair job answering the questions I received considering I couldn't see the graph of the function I was trying to create the equation for. You know, on second thought maybe this could be the business model for a whole new concept in tutoring. Yeah - I can see it now - "You've just dialed 1-800-math-geek. If we don't know the answer we can make one up. Using our amazing powers of E.S.P. we will visualize your math problem and telepathically send you the answers to your questions." Honestly there are plenty of math questions you can answer over the phone, but I really don't know how this girl thought I could come up with the equation of a function that she had a graph of but that I could not see! Ya know, sometimes it does help to be able to see those pesky graphs. After all, that's what they were printed on the paper for.

I love my job!