“So that’s, like, compressed into history, right?”

I’ve been tutoring a high schooler in mathematics.  It’s pretty rewarding (watching his test scores jump from 65% to 93% has been pretty cool, for instance.)  His mother insists, over and over, that I give him “real world” applications of the math he’s learning.  I happen to believe that the math itself is cool and beautiful enough on its own, but, whatever, I can swing with that.

So he was being introduced to exponential decay (“So why is a power of e?”  “No good reason, actually, but it fits the points best.  Since decays aren’t time-sequenced in discrete jumps, it is modeled best as a continuous function.”)  So, aha, applications!  Chernobyl!

1986 … Ukraine … how a power reactor works … how criticality works … how operators try to plunge and remove cores so that they don’t get oscillations, which are modeled like this … criticality … radioactive chain reactions … decay byproducts … Strontium 90 … Calcium … incorporated into bone matricies … people with Strontium irradiation are having children now … geopolitics … Soviet Union … government secrecy and inter-state intervention … shit, I’m outside of the scope of math teaching, get back quick.

I think it helped.  So I do the couple-minute review at the end of which I concluded, poking fun at myself, “And now, if you see Chernobyl in your history book, you’ll know something about it.”

And he says, “Well, maybe.  1986: that’s, like, Nixon, right?”

I try to maintain a poker face while tutoring, but I said, “God, man!  Nixon was before I was born!”

“Well then …?”

“Reagan!”

“Oh.”

“What year were you born?!”

“1993.”

And I’m reminded that Niall will construct sentences that begin with phrases like “Back when Daddy and Nonna were little …”  And then I feel really, really, really old.