Fifth-Grade Math for Dummy Landscapers

10-15 yards of dirt...

Remember fifth-grade math? or are you old enough to have called it "arithmetic"? Whichever, your teacher – Jack Larimer in the case of the Antisocial Network's house mathematician – drilled you hard on checking your work, as did every other teacher you had. Well, unless maybe you're Lillian Teague from eHow.com. Lillian forgot that lesson when she "researched" and wrote "How to Calculate Dirt Yards" (now folded into a "topic"¹ at GardenGuides.com – without her byline. Poor Lillian.)

To the people who drive dump trucks, a yard is shorthand for a "cubic yard," a cube one yard (three feet or 36 inches) on a side. Lillian's task is to - in at least 300 words (that Demand Media minimum word count again) - "explain" how to measure a space and calculate how many yards of dirt you'll need to fill or cover it. Naturally, having never actually done this task, Lillian gets confused. She goes into great detail about how you measure your space - in inches! - with a tape measure, and use a calculator to convert all your measurements to inches. That's a dumbass way to do it, but... it's eHow and Teague needed the extra step to get her minimum of three and the extra words to get her minimum word count. Where Lillian gets everything wonky is her "tip" for conversion: "When working in feet, find the cubic feet of your area and divide it by nine."

Ummm, no, Ms. Teague: that's the conversion factor between square feet and square yards, used for measuring carpets. You have to divide by 27 to convert cubic feet to cubic yards, not nine! Small wonder Lillian's our Dumbass of the Day!

¹ Leaf Group rolled this up with other articles on similar topics, but ultimately deleted it. The original can still be seen using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_5994502_calculate-dirt-yards.html

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