Listen up kids! I’m your new math teacher, Mr. Beer, and I think you’ll find I do things a bit differently than other teachers.

Here’s the deal: I’m young, inspired, and in over my head at this struggling public high school. Over the course of this year, I will constantly butt heads with members of the school administration who don’t understand my unorthodox way of teaching. They just won’t see how it’s possible to care as deeply as I do. They won’t get how I’m able to turn something as dry as a bunch of numbers and operations into an exciting and engaging lesson simply by talking in a wacky accent. In the end, though, all will be forgiven when I manage to help the student that no one believes in pass the big test!

Oh, and one other thing about me: I don’t really know too much about math. I’m more into beer brewing.

But hey, the two subjects need to overlap somewhere, right? Like, all the principles are the same, more or less, right? For example, there are a lot of different kinds of beers that you can brew, just like there are a bunch of different kinds of math problems you can solve. Like plus problems. Or minus problems. Or problems with three numbers and a plus sign and a minus sign all up in there. Or those problems with shapes.

Okay, wait, here’s a better example of brewing-to-math parallels: a beginning beer brewing kit should come with everything needed to brew and bottle your first batch beer, just like a math problem should have everything you need to brew up an answer… or batch of answers, if it’s one of those equations where the answer could be, like, two or negative two. That can happen in math, right?

Or what about this this one: just like how you can run out of beer brewing material and need to buy refills, sometimes with math you need to re-up your numbers. Or something like that, right? I’m pretty sure I read an article recently about how there was a limited number of numbers in the world so scientists were trying to breed them in captivity and then release them back into the Arctic.

Or wait, was that numbers or polar bears? Ugh! I gotta stop drinking so much homebrew while I’m reading science journals!

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