Crumb – What is significant, anyway?

My daughter is the genius of the house, and she’s taking a college class in inorganic chemistry. And she’s in the tenth grade. She’s pulled her hair out this week figuring out significant numbers. The teacher is in and out of the class with a sick husband and handed the class a packet and said, “Here ya go. Learn it. Test on Thursday.” I have great memories of being a kid, but this isn’t helping my daughter. She does great at self-learning programming languages and stuff, but this is tweaking her.

So dad steps in. After all, I’ve spent my life in research, in biology and chemistry and in nuclear stuff. Push came to shove with her not getting it and I confessed to her: I’ve had this stuff in every science and math class I’ve ever taken, and I never got it. And have never consciously used it. Somehow it make intuitive sense to me that if you are dividing by 10 your answer shouldn’t be to the 26th power. She took her test and got one of the few A grades in the class. And she still doesn’t understand it. Neither do I.