Back to school?

Don't worry - no more degrees.  At least this year!   Nope - this time, I'm tackling middle school ;)

So a while back C had to take a math proficiency test which focused on curriculum up to grade 9.   Which is pretty basic, but when it’s been 20 years since you’ve done school math, you’re going to forget formulas etc.    I was one credit shy of a minor in math in uni (not by choice - they were all required as part of CS) and yet I wouldn’t expect I could pass HS math without at least a review.  So as a result he bought a book to review.   

I found said book the other day and flipped through it and was really quite amused by its teaching style.  As a result, I went to see if it were a series - I was hoping there might be a Spanish one.

Alas, while it IS a series, Spanish is not one of the topics.  However, I decided a review of middle school science might be in order and had Amazon ship me the science one, which arrived today.

So the first unit is all about scientific method - skip.  I’m pretty confident in my knowledge of that.  Next unit is Matter, Chemical Reactions, and Solutions.   Perfect - chemistry is the one of the “big three” that I never took in high school, much less uni.

The problem arose on the first page ;)

If you want to join me in middle school, the series is Big Fat Notebooks
 Link to the Science one here.

So - definition of matter, clear enough.  Middle or high school me would’ve memorized and moved on.  Adult me couldn’t get past the first definition: “anything that has mass and takes up space” - well wtf has mass and doesn’t take up space?   Or vise versa?!?!

Alas - middle school doesn’t answer that question.   Fortunately Google does ;).  Suffice to say I spent a while down that rabbit hole and now know about the existence of bosons which I really don't understand at all, but apparently are particles w mass that take no space.   Apparently things that don’t take up space but have mass is still a somewhat theoretical area of physics.  Suffice to say, I'd need a few more degrees to comprehend that rabbit hole ;).  But I now appreciate why the answer to the obvious question is not in the middle school textbook lol

So that killed a significant amount of time on the first page.  This may be more of a time commitment than I expected when I randomly ordered it as a 'quick refresher' ;).  But actually kinda looking forward to it.