A candidate for state superintendent of eduction in Oklahoma has finally figured out what those things called “textbooks” are for: they’re good body armor. His solution to school violence is to explain to kids how they can use a supply of old textbooks to stop bullets.
He is a Republican, of course.
He has a video of himself firing an arsenal at various books. It’s brilliant: he’s going to appeal to all the gun-nut voters, all the voters who hate books, and every idiot in Oklahoma. That’s a big slice of the population.
One flaw: true Republican patriots might wonder why he isn’t shipping all his excess bullet-stopping books to Iraq to protect our troops.
That’s another reason I’m glad I’m a math professor. Our calculus books are 1000-page tomes with real stopping power. Why, they’ve been stopping potential engineers and scientists dead in their tracks for decades. They can certainly stop some little slugs. (By “slugs” I mean bullets, not students.)
Has the candidate for school superintendent considered providing teachers with Wonder Woman bracelets? They’re good for anti-bullet defense, too.
in continuation with Zeno, the virtually potential non-existant power of a book stopping a bullet has been shown on Ghostbusters (a series which i totally love due their arsenal of rapid development being shown off, besides it is real fun).
But to begin with, stupid ppl shouldn`t even be allowed to start a presidential candidacy – i mean by enaction of new acts.
That’s another reason I’m glad I’m a math professor. Our calculus books are 1000-page tomes with real stopping power.
Hah! You obviously (and wisely, if your sanity matters to you) didn’t watch the video! The very first book he tested was a calculus tome that, even backed up by another book of equal thickness, if of lesser density, was unable to stop a 7.6 slug from an AK-47 at 15 feet, much to our hero’s chagrin.
And of course there will be no Wonder Woman bracelets! She’s one of them Ameezons or Lesbosnians of whatever they call them sextual preverts!
Which brings him to the use he has come up with for all them used athletic supporters from the football team …
Do you happen to mean Mythbusters, and not Ghostbusters?
People, don’t snicker at the man. Previously, he didn’t know what books were for. Now he’s thought of one possible use for books. This is progress. Maybe, given a few centuries, a second use will occur to him, perhaps connected with those black squiggly marks on all the white sheets inside the book.
And after all, people don’t burn their bulletproof armor!
Previously, he didn’t know what books were for. Now he’s thought of one possible use for books. This is progress.
Plus, he’s actually gone out and done experimental testing. Like, you know, “gathering data” and stuff. Perhaps soon he will consider extending this radical idea to other aspects of the world.
Of course, what he isn’t taking into account is that faith is better armor than even books can be. If God doesn’t want that bullet to hit you, it won’t. If it’s part of His plan, even Dostoyevsky won’t be enough to save you.
Your title, Stupid people shouldn’t be allowed to run for the state board of education, makes it seem like you don’t follow too many candidates for superintendent. In any race for superintendent, you have to have at least one candidate who’s a complete frigging moron.
Case in point: South Carolina’s Karen “Long gone are the days when God was excluded from scientific circles. If we ignore that reality, we will only limit our children’s scientific knowledge.” Floyd.
(See http://shrimpandgrits.rickandpatty.com/2006/06/15/what-i-wish-they-had-said-and-what-they-actually-said/ )
But back to the subject at hand – if you want true stopping power, try a copy of Perry’s Chemical Engineers’ Handbook. :)
Since I can’t seem to watch the video, I’m now morbidly curious. Did he do a true test of the “armor of God” by using the Bible as a target? Surely, God would prevent the bullet from penetrating His Word!
Too bad Jim Varney died. He could have made the movie Ernest Runs for State Superintendent.
“HEY VERN! Watch me shoot this book!”
Sorry Rick, he did not test the bible. He used a Calculus book, an Earth Science book, and a Language Arts book. I guess his faith wasn’t strong enough to trust “The Good Book.”
About half a minute into the video:
Idiot with the camera: Does that rifle have a firing pin?
BANG!!
Idiot with the Khalishnikov: Yeah, it’s got a firing pin.
mythbusters of course :D
How naive. True republican believers would be wondering why he wasn´t selling the books to our troops in Iraq at 20 times their new value and then sending them half of them and only the thinnest volumes.
Whats good for a republicans personal profit is good for our troops.
I’m surprised he hasn’t suggested that the schools require that all text books be printed on stone tablets. That way they would conform to biblical standards AND serve as bullet proof vests, their education potential be damned. They’d also serve to build the muscles in all those kids required to tote them from home to school and back each day.
If it’s all the same to you, I’ll continue spending my days thinking of new ways to avoid being shot, instead of checking my library for potential use as armor. (besides, we all know that something like Casarett and Doull’s Toxicology is not only thick, but acts to deter violence through it’s threatening title and appearance)
If it’s all the same to you, I’ll continue spending my days thinking of new ways to avoid being shot, instead of…
Reminds me of the old Triumph sports car commercial where, after showing clips demonstrating their disc brakes and rack and pinion steering, the announcer intoned solemnly “And now our 10-mph bumper” with one of those slo-mo side shots of the car heading toward the wall. The car passes by the other side of the wall, and the announcer, in his arch Brit accent, says: “In Europe we try to miss the walls.”
Psst! Hey–just make those textbooks science textbooks! Right? I mean, as every soldier knows, you have to “know your weapon.” Eh? Just as you have to know how to take your gun apart and put it together, the students will have to read the whole textbook, especially the section about evolution! What an opportunity here! ;-)
I’ve got my five-inch thick copy of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition, and I’m practically married to it now. As my cataloging instructor says, nobody messes with catalogers.
Come on, now. Good bible-thumping christians aren’t going to put THEIR book to the ‘bullet stopper’ test. That would be anti-american, anti-republican and downright anti-righteousness.
The Quran, on the other hand…
My thanks for ROTFL, especially to Zeno. You know when you are too stressed to engage forebrain, because unexpected humor hits hard.
Though I’m a bit distressed by math books inability to shield from real world penetration. Why isn’t a universal cover enough? I want to see the disproof!
Anyway, I would try a book on metallurgy next.
The Quran, on the other hand…
It’s already been done.
I suspect there is an opportunity here. I know I could make one hell of an effective body armor by linking several copies of my MIT Intro to Algorithms backed up in several placed by copies of An Intro to Kolmogorov Complexity and it’s Applications.
I’d be bullet proof.
I admit that I did not originally view the Crozier video, fearing for my mental health. However, I felt it was my duty as a calculus teacher to check it out. I was shocked to see that he used a skinny edition of a calculus text instead of the standard 1000-page version. This oversight will undoubtedly make calculus students feel less safe than they should at the thought of having their classroom assaulted by someone wielding an AK-47.
Crozier’s example is still an inspiration to us all, however. In particular, I think a fort constructed out of calculus books could be quite a formidable redoubt. After all, don’t most of us have dozens of calculus books lying around, just waiting to be used in construction projects?
Appalling waste that this involves …
Now I’m confused. Isn’t math supposed to be kept consistent, thus making doubt and redoubt useless?
May I ask why the hell American calculus textbooks have to have a thousand pages? If I had to guess, I’d say the math books I studied for my A-Levels for didn’t have 200 pages about calculus between them.
Alon:
American beancounters tend to value quantity over quantity. I’m pretty certain you can learn as much calculus in a 300-page Dummies book as you can in a 1000-page textbook, but a scruffy little yellow-and-black paperback doesn’t look authoritative.
Besides which, the textbook publishers of the United States are engaged in two conspiracies for the price of one. The first, based on their pricing structure, is to drive book merchants insane by not allowing them to quote a firm price to customers. The second, which applies here, is to cram as much shovelware into their books as possible so they can look impressive and at the same time channel massive amounts to the chiropractic industry — see, big textbooks, heavy backpacks, students with back problems… it all works out…
/let’s not even get into the National Zoo and their fleet of black helicopters
He has a video of himself firing an arsenal at various books.
well, that’s a new spin on book burning, at least.
Not at all on topic, but hard-hitting stuff, here:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601019_after_pats_birthday/.
Hey! Our hero is now suggesting making book covers out of Kevlar, the same material used by the military for body armor.
Will the hilarity ever cease? … Other than if this buffoon actually wins, that is.
Did they try “Of Pandas and People”? Its sad 150 pages isn’t going to stop much-
http://www.amazon.com/Pandas-People-Question-Biological-Origins/dp/0914513400/sr=8-1/qid=1161471002/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2416653-3045550?ie=UTF8&s=books
Ironic that in the scenario that schools descend into total chaos, and textbooks are used for defense, that the one denying evolution would present a selective disadvantage in survival….
“Its sad 150 pages isn’t going to stop much”
The larger problem is that it isn’t hard science.
A most excellent question. Part of the reason is feature creep, which is as bad as it sounds. Calculus books were already pretty chubby when I began college back in the 1960s because lots of topics were being stuck into the three-semester calculus sequence, but then “enhancements” struck with a vengeance. Lots of irrelevant art began to appear to make the books into eye candy. (In full color, for no apparent reason.) Like the Larson book wasting space on fractals. Then extra help features for students (like built-in study guides) began to appear. Each chapter begins with a run down of the sections it contains. Each section begins with a list of objectives and ends with a summary of those objectives. The chapter itself ends with a summary of the summaries (or something like that). Then there’s the arms race of who has the most exercises.
Books like Stewart’s also contain special projects that supposedly extend the text’s concepts (and perhaps some do). Others followed suit, since anything that appears to be a marketing gimmick in one book will be quickly adopted by other books. I think most textbook revisions these days are done with a spread of open rival texts scattered on the work table for reference purposes. (I know of one case where a calculus author included an original problem that was based on a nonintuitive result that fell out of his research. In the next revision cycle it began to pop up in other books. Yeah, they’re all reading each other.)
The “lean & lively” reaction of the 1980s led to reform textbooks like the Harvard Project headed up by Hughes-Hallett, but even that book began to converge on the mainstream with each revision. Howard Anton says the fat calculus book is actually a pretty good deal because most students get to use it for three semesters instead of buying a new high-priced book every term. He’s right (except for the students who drop out in the first semester and get very little of their money’s worth), but the bloat factor consists principally of the supposed enhancements that add pages and pages to the actual calculus.
You still don’t need a big fat calculus book for that. The A-Level’s caluclus syllabus is the same as this of American universities’ single-variable calculus courses, minus the definitions of continuity and differentiability. Adding multivariate calculus isn’t that hard, as long as you concentrate on explaining Stokes’ theorem (and explain it in full instead of just give the 2D and 3D versions), multivariate differentiation, etc., instead of gigantic pictures of wind patterns as an example of a vector field.
Of course, this assumes you need a printed textbook, which you really don’t. Writing lecture notes and distributing them for free isn’t that hard; the standard textbook on basic algebraic topology can even be downloaded for free from the author’s website. Surely there are enough professors who’ve realized there are advantages to writing their own notes that the rest can just copy theirs…
Although you have a point, Alon, a lot of calculus instruction in the U.S. occurs with teenagers in high school and junior college. Many (way too many) of those students are only marginally ready for calculus, but take it anyway. (I really don’t see a good reason for doing calculus in high school with 17-year-olds, but it’s popular.) Most of the teachers want plenty of homework problems to assign their students and they don’t want to write their own. Sure, they could borrow someone else’s, but textbooks provide them — together with on-line solution sets and help features that many instructors rely on.
Adopting a textbook brings a whole support structure with it, including test banks (I don’t care for them, but some of my colleagues swear by them). Can you piece it all together yourself? Of course. But it’s simpler to just adopt a textbook and not hassle with writing your own notes, or downloading a set of lectures and duplicating them for your students (many of our students take terrible notes — if any — and rely on printed material for future reference). It’s the reality of calculus instruction today.
I don’t think we’re going to break this cycle any time soon, although textbooks in electronic form may be the opening wedge for some major changes down the road.
Ah, high school is something completely different. I was thinking mostly on the college level, where there tend to be fewer homework problems, and where it’s usually easier to plagiarize someone else’s notes.
I happen to think everyone should start college with a solid footing in univariate calculus, but apparently most American high schools disagree (by the way, if you want a good reason, it’s that when combined with better writing and science instruction in high school, it allows students to finish college in 3 years).
Spoken like a man who has never tried it, or at least never tried in on an American campus. I’ve never figured out why students seem to want textbooks, since many of them get resold to the campus bookstore with the spines uncracked, but they hate courses where there isn’t a prescribed text. At least in my experience.
Possibly they use them as talismans.
BTW, all my lecture notes are power point and on the web. They still love a text.
C’mon, give the guy a break. Sure, what he said was idiotic and doesn’t work, but it is a HELL of a lot better than the Republicans who are arguing that the way to stop classroom violence is to arm teachers (and, I think, some include arming students in that).
In the U.S. we have these things in high school called AP classes (Advanced Placement). These offer college credit and are much sought after. Unfortunately, many of these offerings are pallid imitations of the real thing. I often get students at my community college who think they know calculus because they took AP calculus in their high school. The reality is usually that they remember the power rule and think differentiating polynomials demonstrates their mastery. They get irritated when you insist they know how to interpret those derivatives as rates of change (if they know anything, they may recall the slope of a tangent line). In brief, univariate calculus in the high school is very weak as presently constituted. Many of us would be happy if they just learned algebra really well before they came to college. (We teach more algebra at my community college than any other math course.)
There is a trend toward toughening up the high school curriculum, although too much of our recent emphasis in this country is on high-stakes exit exams. Perhaps one day we’ll add some carrot to go with the stick.
Guys, he’s just trying to be helpful. To be sure, such a tactic would be a move of utter desperation…and you’d probably be just as well off to throw your book at your attacker and run like hell. And if someone gets the drop on you, well, you’re pretty much just f*cked, no matter what you do.
off topic a bit, I remember some nut in our old neigborhood who let loose with a single .44 magnum shot across the bayou…it bored through his fence, flew across the bayou, bored through our fence, the outer wall of our townhouse (mostly particle board and sheetrock), my mom’s nightstand, then came to rest buried deep in one of my mom’s trashy pulp paperbacks. The bullet was in surpisingly good condition when we found it. We called the cops, but I don’t know if they investigated or issued any fines, etc.
I don’t know if I’d be for arming teachers, but they should probably increase the campus police presence…more officers on duty per campus, etc. Our school district has expanded by leaps and bounds since I was a student, and i really don’t know if the FBISD police force has kept pace with the growth. Maybe they should encourage PE coaches to get CCW certified and encourage them to carry–& train & drill periodically with the regular campus police. Maybe issue paintball guns to classroom teachers…something to provide disruptive but non-leathal defensive covering fire while the class makes a run for it.
Metal detectors–maybe, I just don’t know. Books as shields? Dunno…if you had no other recourse, maybe. It’s a desperation tactic only. I carried most all of my books with me in High school, in a big honking bag. Never did it, because I had JROTC friends to watch my back, but I did sometimes consider breaking down a break-action shotgun and putting it in my bag, back when I was 16-18, as added protection. Like I said, never did it, but the thought did cross my mind. I was on the JROTC drill team, we had dummy M-1 Garands as drill pieces. We could “check them out” from the “Armory” and go home with them to practice…I always felt more comfortable carrying one (I also had the proper bayonet for the M-1 in my car), since it was like carrying a club. Sometimes made the cops nervous, watching us walk home from school with them slung over our shoulders. The good thing about JROTC is that if bullies start beating up on 1 kid wearing the uniform, the bullies will soon be facing about 10-15 other kids in uniform. We always backed each other up like that.
Most students keep their books in their lockers; many will leave them there even when class time rolls round because they don’t want to carry them around.
If they could use the teacher’s classroom as a locker, they would prefer to.
It’s bad enough when adult crazies attack schools, it’s horrific when other students do. But simplistic “gun control” isn’t the answer. Outlaw handguns and criminals will resort to sawn off long guns, for one thing. Defensive use of legally owned guns works, too. Give coaches CHL and give them an extra period off to help patrol the campus. Also, take bullying seriously and punish it effectively…i’d say bullying or the fear of it drives more than a few students to want to pack heat…some just snap and turn on their agressors. Others are also deeply emotionally disturbed. I do think FPS games (fun though they are) also probably DO de-sensitize adolescents…games like America’s Army, a blatant propoganda tool, disturb me. Too much “virtual” shooting, not enough familiarity with real firearms, the ethics, saftey precautions, respect and responsibilities that come with gun ownership, etc. In life there is no reset button.
With the way other things in our political realm are moving, there is no way I would support any gun-control measures; current laws are sufficient (some are already even overly restrictive). All the wacky militia talk during the Clinton years—doesn’t sound so wacky anymore with Bush II in office.
Zeno: Funny you should mention Anton, since he has(had?) a linear algebra text which I own in abridged edition. Mind you, those are double edged, because if one winds up taking two semesters where one originally expected 1 (for example) one will pay more than if one just bought the complete edition in the first place.
Prup aka Jim Benton: One can be idiotic and still less of an idiot than someone else …
Yes, Keith, Anton’s linear algebra text is still around. I used to see Howard at various math association meetings (though it’s been a few years). I remember one time he was talking about colleagues who casually mentioned they were thinking of writing a calculus text like his, since it was obviously pretty easy. (Perhaps Howard was exaggerating the degree to which they got in his face, I don’t know.) The punchline to Howard’s story was that he would ask such colleagues if they had the patience to sit down and carefully turn each page of his textbook, spending just a few seconds for each turn. He says they all blanched and no one took him up on his challenge.