Solving Equations for Dummy Math Students

Solve this equation, Oliver...

The people at the Antisocial Network are pretty much like anyone in the age of the internet: when we want to know something, we whip out our smartphones (android, never iOs) and fire up Google to look for an answer. We all know that's why content farms, especially those claiming to specialize in "how-to" took off a decade or so ago, but we learned a hard lesson from those places: don't trust them! When we look for an answer or help on a new problem, we want someone with experience and know-how to explain things, and we want an answer: not someone dancing around the topic and never actually saying anything. That's why we returned to Oliver VanDervoort and Catalogs.com: the guy just plain bullshitted his way through something he called "How to Solve Math Equations," back when the site was WhoWhatWhereWhenWhy.com. You can see why they left out the "how" after reading this crap.

We have people on staff who aren't afraid to tackle a math problem. We asked one of them how you might describe the process of solving an equation, and she hemmed and hawed for a couple of minutes before allowing that, without seeing the equation in question, you can't write a "how-to" for this topic. She did, however, mention a few words she figured would probably show up somewhere in most such answers, including

• substitute 
• reduce 
• simplify

Of course, Oliver's little how-to includes none of these three. In fact, VanderVoort states right up front that  "This article will not give you the skeleton key to solving problems..." ...well, duh, of course not: there is none! But there are techniques Oliver never mentions that would help! VanDervoort does little beyond referring his readers to a couple of websites such as one that he says "...will not tell you how to solve the problem so much in that [it] will actually give you the answer so you don't need to figure out the solution..."

Clearly, Oliver's never heard the wise old adage that begins, "Give a man a fish..."! Once that marvelous "advice" is out of the way, our boy charges on, He doesn't actually say how to solve an equation, though. No, VanDervoort next instructs his readers to "remember... that there is a reason for the solution" and to "make sure you [take] adequate notes" as their teachers explain the process of solution. At that, we wondered what we should be doing, now that we're no longer in middle school...

Riddle us this: VanDervoort really had the unmitigated gall to title this piece of crap "How to Solve Math Equations"? Even though there is not a single word about solving an equation, and the only example the dumbass supplies is "2+2"; which isn't even an equation, come to think of it!

Small wonder that our research staff recognized a mother lode of dumbassery in Oliver's "work." We predict that VanDervoort is a name you can expect to see again, perhaps even rising to the level of a Whetzel or a Manal. Whatever the case, this is Oliver's second Dumbass of the Day award during Catalogs.com week – but we suspect it won't be his last!

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