operations
Explanation
The Joke
A banner at the top reads "Why do 98% of math teachers do this?" A math teacher is shown explaining arithmetic operations to students in a very clear, intuitive way: addition is putting things together, subtraction is removing things, multiplication is repeated addition, division is determining how much of one number is contained in another, exponentiation is repeated multiplication... and then logarithms "undo exponentiation by unfathomable dark sorcery."
The comic captures the common experience in math education where basic operations are taught with clear, accessible explanations, building confidence step by step -- until you hit logarithms, at which point the intuitive explanations abruptly vanish and students are left feeling like they have entered some arcane realm of incomprehensibility.
The Humor
The joke works because of the sudden tonal shift. Each operation gets a slightly more complex but still understandable plain-English definition, creating a pattern that lulls the reader into expecting the same treatment for logarithms. Instead, the teacher abandons all pedagogical clarity and labels them "unfathomable dark sorcery." This resonates deeply with anyone who sailed through arithmetic only to hit a wall at logarithms. The "98% of math teachers" framing in the banner adds to the humor by presenting this as a universal pedagogical failure rather than an individual one.
References
Logarithms are the inverse function of exponentiation: if b^x = y, then log_b(y) = x. Despite being conceptually straightforward, they are notoriously difficult for students to grasp intuitively, partly because there is no simple physical analogy the way "putting things together" works for addition.