That's a good question and it is exactly what my 10 year old daughter asked me the other night. She had a homework assignment that I must admit was on the lame side for what should usually come for a 5th grader (but then again it was the first of the year, a warm up). She had to identify 6 of each of several 3D objects including a pyramid.
"Is there a pyramid in the house?"
"We don't tend to have Egyptian artifacts lying around."
"It doesn't have to be that. Just something that is a square based pyramid. Not a triangular based one like you suggested last year."
"What was the triangular based one?"
"Some piece of some puzzle blocks."
"Still not sure we have one."
"Well, I have to find six of them to fill in this table."
"Six. There aren't six pyramids in an Egyptian palace let alone here. What are your teachers on about? Can we build one from Lego?"
"No."
"Well, you'll have to tell them we don't have them."
"Dad, like the teacher would set this assignment if pyramids weren't common in NORMAL houses."
Just my like that some descendant of Professor Carter will turn up her class with a pyramid swag. We had similar issues with the rest of the table. Only cylinders and rectangular prisms were in healthy supply. We had a square prism (thank you tupperware and Nintendo GameCube) but no triangular prism and we were short of actual cubes. We made up Toblerone and found an old Rubik's Cube.
Then it occurred to me that I could use Twitter to tap into the mob of followers to see what they could find. So I put out a call and alas nothing came back but a suggestion to look for toys. Sigh. If I can't use my web presence to inappropriately help my daughter with an impossible homework assignment, what good is it?
