Contributed by
Owen Thomas, TenpageNews
" Bridges plays a math professor with zero stage
presence who bores his students silly by lecturing to the board and sticking to his subject (calculus). Barbara Streisand is an
incredibly popular English teacher despite her rambling lecture style and gives him a few pointers. We're asked along the way to
believe that Bridges doesn't know what a batting average is; Barbara explains it to him (incorrectly). Then Bridges talks about
baseball in class and suddenly can relate to the students better. Fortunately, this is a godawful movie all the way around and
nobody's going to see it, much less be influenced by its ``math is boring and irrelevant and taught by incompetents'' subtext. I do
have to admit that there's much more than the usual amount of math mentioned in the lecture scenes: Bridges mentions implicit
differentiation -- ``pretend y is a function of x'' -- and the chain rule, and there's lots of cool looking writing on the board including
some polar co-ordinates. There's an ongoing bit concerning prime numbers, specifically the twin primes conjecture. Jeff is excited
when Barbara understands what a prime number is so she gives him some cufflinks with prime numbers on them." |