Having decided that a single day is not enough to get the word out about dysclaculia, some of us at the dyscalculia forum have decided to declare March to be Dyscalclulia Awareness Month. This will allow more flexibility for staging events, especially for students at college or university, since some of them are already on Spring Break this week.
I decided to start making Dyscalculia Awareness t-shirts over at Zazzle, so I was looking for some funny math-related quotes to put on them. I came across this one from Robert Heinlein, author of Stranger In A Strange Land and many other classic science fiction novels. I was never a huge fan of his work — while his work clearly advocates sexual liberation, it is very much from a mid-century attitude toward sexuality and gender. His stories are imbued with casual, unreflective homophobia and sexism. A (female!) character in Stranger remarks to the protagonist that true rape is actually very difficult, and that most of the time the woman wanted it anyway.
Yes, really.
So that was it for me and Robert Heinlein. But now I’ve found another reason to dislike him — he apparently hated dyscalculics too:
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. ~Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
So screw you, Robert Heinlein.
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