Mathematics

In his elegant book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum teaches us many golden rules that we can extrapolate into the sophisticated adult world. Very true. Another way to appreciate his wisdom is to see how the subsequent teachings after our kindergarten can be remarkably wrong.

As we move on from the kindergarten to elementary school through graduate school, we learn the mathematics. We were taught that "one plus two equals three" and then "minus one plus one balances out each other." Simple enough? Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in real life. Imagine two grown-ups fighting with each other (that happens every now and then!). First, one slaps on the face of another, who then returns with another slap (and makes sure that the blow lands with the same force). It should be obvious that such equation cannot be computed from what we learned from the mathematics class. Anyone with an iota of common sense, let alone those who have attended kindergarten, realizes that "one plus minus one" here does not add up to zero.

Am I making too much of this?

Not really. I wasn't sure how many of us have tried to re-do something that we did it wrong at the first place, keeping the false hope that "minus one plus one" would negate each other. My patient went home after being hospitalized for chest pain and developed a major heart attack two days later. I called him and asked if there is anything we can do (to be exact, re-do) for him. No way! He didn't want to see us again.

Admit it. Minus one plus one never adds up to zero – not anymore after our kindergarten days.