OK, math education is officially broken

Apparently the second week of class was w-a-a-y overstimulating for me.

Last week’s extreme point came during office hours when one student–a
so-so math major–keyed the number 0.0044 into his calculator, squared
it, and interpreted the result, 1.936E-05, as an error.  "Look!"
he said in confusion. "Yeah? So?" I replied; there’s nothing remarkable
about a product.  It took 5 minutes of this goofy dialog for me to
realize that this college junior had never seen numbers in scientific notation.  No wonder I’m crazy.

From one of my annoying comments over at MathandText.