I've had a student like that, Fay. I was sitting there saying, "What's one minus one half? No, don't put that into your calculator. One minus one half. You have one, you take away one half, what's left? You have one whole thing. You subtract half of it. How much of it is left?" And he just sat there, staring at me, bewildered. He tried throwing out answers like "one quarter" and "negative one," and it was clear he was just grabbing numbers from the air until something was right. And this was a calculus class.

Yesterday, a few other grad students and I were comparing all the different analogies we'd heard and/or used for the cylindrical shells method. Essentially, this method is taking a bunch of hollow cylinders and putting them one inside the other, tightly packed together, to form a solid cylinder. (Or, some other solid shape -- they can get progressively taller as you go in, so you make a cone, for example.) The most common seemed to be rolls of paper towels and onions. I tried for some variety with Russian stacking dolls with their heads and feet cut off. Someone else had something equally weird, but I can't remember it now.

Barb, where did you see the news about the publishing industry? You're waaaay more connected than I am. (Because yes, I want to read about what is going on and freak myself out.)

Hil, even though I don't necessarily understand the math, I have the same issues when I am trying to teach students about making a pattern. Since it involves flat shapes that become three dimensional, and I tend to so it with instinct and not math, it becomes impossible to explain show a concave and a convex curve of slightly differing lenghts comes together to form a sleeve that allows a person to move.

Just throwing out ideas. Could use physical things. Building blocks? Could you find a toy pie with slices to help explain fractions. ("Here is a pie. Here is half a pie".) Maybe you could use a real pie - heck of a motivator. Food in general might a be a good way to explain math to the math resistant - at least elementary stuff like addition and fractions.

Jilli, by and large, what I'm hearing seems to affect mostly fiction. But the Reader's Digest version is this:

- Simon & Schuster has eliminated 35 positions.

- It also announced that the head of its children’s group, Rick Richter will leave the company at the end of the week. Rubin Pfeffer, senior v-p and publisher of the children’s group is also leaving.

- Random House has been reorganized, including disbanding Doubleday. President and publisher of the Bantam Dell group Irwyn Applebaum is leaving the company after 25 years. Publisher's Lunch says, "Knopf will absorb the Doubleday and Nan A. Talese lines, while the Crown group will incorporate Broadway, Doubleday Business, Doubleday Religion and WaterBrook Multnomah," and that "the newly formed publishing groups will continue to bid independently in auctions," though there are now three of them instead of five.

- Thomas Nelson has eliminated 54 positions, after an earlier round of cuts in September.

- The publisher of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's adult trade division, Becky Saletan, has resigned

The Random House reorg is the one that has me sort of chewing my nails. It's been a much-needed reorg because they had so many imprints that overlapped and in some cases, even their editorial boards had joint meetings, so you couldn't necessarily submit to multiple imprints-- in the long run, it's going to be a good thing that it's more streamlined, but it does take away the (admittedly somewhat mythical) safety net of "Well, if Imprint A doesn't take it, maybe Imprint B at the same house will be interested."

Huh. Thanks, Barb. So no word on HarperCollins?

Hil, even though I don't necessarily understand the math, I have the same issues when I am trying to teach students about making a pattern. Since it involves flat shapes that become three dimensional, and I tend to so it with instinct and not math,

What I'm doing here really doesn't involve much math, at least for the beginning part. It's different methods for measuring volume, where, essentially, you're cutting the object into smaller pieces and measuring the volume of each piece, and then adding them up. But in order to get to the part where you find an expression for the volume of each piece, you first have to look at the numerical description of the object and figure out what it will look like physically, and then you have to look at that and figure out what the pieces you cut it into will look like. Some of my students are having trouble with those two steps. (And then there are some who just refuse to do them, and want to go right from the numerical description of the object to writing down the answer, which you just can't do, because without the picture, you can't tell which parts of the numerical description correspond to which parts of the object, and just about always end up doing something like switching the top and the bottom, or having the whole thing sideways, or just having the wrong object altogether.)

Huh. Thanks, Barb. So no word on HarperCollins?

Nothing that I've seen and I've been getting the updates from Pub Marketplace and Publisher's Weekly all day.

Our company had lay-offs this morning.

I had to come in at 8 to break the news to half of my awesome team. Saying goodbye to two people whom I've come to adore and who worked their asses off for this company's success. Merry fucking Christmas. It's just me and Ricardo left in my department. 20% cut across the company.

It's been a really shitty day.