Remember your units

I remember one of my maths teachers at school - a certain Mr Shaftesbury - who despaired of me. I think he was the one who told my parents I would never be able to do even simple arithmetic.

I was reminded of him a couple of hours ago when our order for 4 carrots turned up as 4 kilograms of carrots... for he was always one to mark down answers, quite dramatically, if you failed to show your workings as to how you got to an answer, or you failed to state the units. The workings - well .. "it's obvious" were often my words (and it was to me), but in hindsight his lesson on stating the units - as has been shown by today's experience - was clearly well thought through and well intended.

Thinking back, I suspect that Mr Shaftesbury had me down as a cheat when I provided just the nubs of the answer - but in fact that wasn't the case. It was always somewhat more important to me to have the answer than to be too bothered by how I reached it, and it was somewhat more important to me to spend my time doing other things and leaving mey homework to be rushed (and so looking distinctly un-neat) on my way in to school.

(written 2008-10-31, updated 2008-11-02)

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