Thursday, April 21, 2011

"From the Math Lab" by Teng Wang

A black woman who was wearing a turquoise T-shirt was sitting beside me in the math lab. She raised her hand, and that meant she did need some help on her math.

A tutor went to her table and asked, “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, I am working on how to find the slope of the equation, and that makes me confused,” she said.

“Well, do you have some questions that I can focus on?”

“Yes, I do,” she answered, “here is the exercise from my homework.”

“OK. I need to show you a formula to solve these serious problems,” the tutor said. And then, he wrote down one formula on a piece of paper and explained to her, “Y equals mX plus b. The coefficient of X is called ‘slope’, and b is ‘y-intercept’.”

“Wow! I never saw that before,” she said.

“Let’s do one example together. So, we need to plug in numbers for X and Y, and then, we will find the slope and y-intercept.”

She nodded and said, “That makes sense! I feel better right now! Thanks for your help!”

“You are welcome.”

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