oeis
Explanation
This comic imagines what would happen if a professional research mathematician were forced to teach kindergarten.
A woman (the mathematician-turned-kindergarten-teacher) stands at the front of a classroom, holding up student papers and scolding the children: "A lot of people here are writing down ACTUAL NUMBERS instead of just indicating whether or not the sequence is listed on O.E.I.S.! This is a waste of YOUR time, this is a waste of MY time."
The caption below reads: "Having professional mathematicians teach kindergarten was a mistake."
The O.E.I.S. (Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences) is a real and well-known database in mathematics, founded by Neil Sloane. It catalogs hundreds of thousands of integer sequences (like the Fibonacci numbers, prime numbers, etc.) and is a standard reference tool for researchers. When a mathematician encounters a sequence of numbers in their work, one of the first things they do is check whether it appears in the OEIS, which can reveal unexpected connections between different areas of math.
The joke is that the mathematician is so deeply embedded in her professional habits that she expects kindergarteners -- who are just learning to write numbers at all -- to skip the actual numbers and simply reference OEIS catalog entries instead. To her, writing out individual numbers is beneath the dignity of the task; what matters is classifying sequences. This is, of course, wildly inappropriate for five-year-olds who are still mastering counting.
The comic plays on the recurring SMBC theme of experts being hilariously unsuited to contexts outside their specialty, and on the niche humor of mathematics culture.