As they were reviewing for the final, a student walked up and quietly asked a question.
“Well,” I began to answer. “Do you remember when we talked about matrix multiplication?”
“Kinda,” she said, drawing it out in the way they do when they in fact don’t remember.
“There was a problem about four women runners and how many points they earned.”
“And you made sound effects.”
“I did,” I said.
I reached to the whiteboard and acted as if I were removing a row from a matrix (making a creaking “errrrhhhkkk”), turning it (making a hooting “wooop”), and lining it up against an imagined vector (making a tongue-popping percussive sound).
“That was it,” she said.
The rest of the answer to her question was relatively easy.