Challenge 1037

No Irregular Verbs in Math

In Gary Inbinder’s The Girl on the Rush Street Bridge:
1. Between Chapter 25 and 29, how many scoundrels does Max Niemand kill or cause to be killed?
2. How does Max Niemand rate the fremale characters in the novel? List them on a scale from best to worst and identify the distinctive traits in each.
3. What does Chapter 28 imply about the need for an extra-legal law enforcement personality like Max Niemand? Is the motorcycle farce a diversion from the theme of hapless or corrupt policing, or is it a culmination of the theme?
4. Does Max Niemand himself live by the Biblical injunction that he quotes to Mr. Meijer at the end of Chapter 29? Why might one say he does? In all his shooting and “hellfire,” does he technically commit first-degree murder? At what points in the novel does he resist temptation? What does it usually consist of?
In Mark Mitchell’s Welcome to Dearth: How might the story fit into the history of the concept of Purgatory?
In Sam Ruleman’s Sugarbomb:
1. Clues to the true nature of Candyland occur at the very beginning of the story. How are they distributed to make the readers gradually aware that the setting is wartime?
2. Does anything in the story suggest that the children’s perceptions are being affected by drugs?
3. At the end, why is the report of real-life events dismissed with a shrug of indifference? Is the story a parody of the terrors of the Blitz?
In Huina Zheng’s Perils of the Slow Track:
1. In what way are Zhang Yi-ting’s math teacher’s “tutorials” a form of corruption? Does Yi-ting abstain from them out of principle or for another reason?
2. Does Yi-ting believe she does not have the ability to learn mathematics as well as she can perform dance or learn languages? In view of the paid tutorials, might one suspect that all instruction is designed to create “fast” and “slow” tracks?
3. Bonus question: In John Mighton’s The Myth of Ability: Nurturing Mathematical Talent in Every Child (Toronto: Anansi, 2003), the author reports how all the school students in a teaching experiment mastered increasingly complex levels of mathematics when given a systematic, stepwise approach. What courses have you taken, in any subject, where the premise was: “Here’s a problem, you figure it out” rather than “Let’s learn how to use tools that will help us solve problems”?

Responses welcome!