Last month, I was helping some 6th-graders prepare for their final exam when it became clear that their teacher had utterly failed them. “You poor souls!” I said. “Orphaned by intellectual negligence!”
They blinked hopefully, as children do.
“Who was it?” I demanded. “Who taught you – or should I say, failed to teach you?”
“Um…” they hesitated. “You?”
“Well, whoever it was,” I said, “he denied you the chance to experience the beauty and centrality of the distributive property. For this, he shall have my undying scorn.”
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once described European philosophy as “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Twist his arm enough, and perhaps he’d have consented to describe algebra as “a series of footnotes to the distributive property.”
