It runs in the family

[mystories]

My mom was going back to school to prepare to re-enter the workforce, and we ended up deciding to take the same math class. After a few weeks, the teacher called us both in. She explained that she was a little curious how we did things. We always sat together, and had the same surname, and when she'd hand out a test, she'd get back a lot of copies of essentially the approach she'd just taught, and two oddballs, from us. At first she thought we were copying from each other, but then she noticed our solutions were not only unrelated to what she was teaching, but to each other.

For example, she pulled out our most recent test, which contained a problem involving proving that the four points provided were the corners of a square. I had done something involving line lengths and reciprocal slopes. My mom had shown that the diagonals were the same length and perpendicular. Whereupon I pointed out that this didn't constitute a proof of squareness - unless the diagonals were perpendicular bisectors, you could have a figure known as a "kite", not a square. The teacher was boggled she hadn't even seen the flaw in the reasoning, but let my mom keep the credit for her answer.