Oba, when I was still in my training overalls Taunte Helen tried to teach me the maths, but I yust couldn’t figure it out yet. Even when the smartest boy in school, Obrom ‘Fuela‘ Kornelson, showed to me the way to do it, I was more interested in the cows because them I could count for sure.
The only ting I remembered from him was that you need to know the PEDMAS, which is an Englisher word that I think means means Pray Every Day, Marry A Schmidt. Well, that’s exactly what I did, and that Schmidt girl from Rosenort taughts to me averything there is to know about numbers and such.
So, this is a very tricky question and basically I’m the only Mennonite in all of Schanzenfeld who knows how to do it. I axed Mr. Friesen and he said, “nay, it doesn’t give such.” I axed Mrs. Braun, but she just thought I was being a schwäa. The Reverend was confused and said it looked to him like a Bible verse and wondered which book it was in. Maybe the Catholic Bible, he figured.
8÷2(3+1) = well, what yet?
Here is how Aggie Hiebert nee Schmidt showed me how.
Well, Aggie always tells me the most important thing to do first is to close the barn doors so that no one can see what you’re doing. Let’s do that. So, we have 3 cousins and 1 more yet. Well, even I can do that math. That’s 4 cousins in the barn there. Then we go around outside and check on the chickens. It seems a few have escaped. 8 of them, in fact. Old Mr. Heppner is going to be mighty upset if we don’t do something about it. So we’ll take the 8 hens and sell half of them to the Englishers. They can be the skinniest ugliest chickens; Englishers can’t tell the difference anyway. So, that leaves us with 4 chickens outside the barn and 4 cousins on the inside. Now the cousins are getting mighty hungry after all that frolicking and dandelion wine-drinking in the barn, so they head outside and start with the butchering yet. In the end there’s blood and chicken heads everywhere, but they’ve each got four pieces of chicken, with plenty of gnurple to around.
Alright, then, so the answer, according to Aggie Schmidt is 16 pieces of chicken, including the gizzards.
Oba, did you get it right?
Don’t blame yourself. You might never have had the edumacation that I did.
