I feel like I should be bringing a baseball, glove, and bat to class. This semester I'm teaching General Physics, the course for pre-meds, architecture, kinesiology, life sciences. I'm in the section on projectile motion, and I find myself teaching a few of the foreign students more about sports than physics, as most of the problems offered in the texts reference sports. Back when I took physics, lo those many years ago, there were the more canonical guns and cannons questions. Now all of the books have been re-written to be less violent. When I find myself wondering how to translate "shot-put" and "shortstop" in Farsi, I yearn for the days of weaponry questions.

I mentioned this to one of the other instructors, who said she didn't like either the artillery or sports questions because they were biased against females. Which made me ask myself the following: what would be a female-oriented projectile motion question? Martha throws tomatoes into her shopping cart from a distance of 4 meters away. With what speed should she throw the tomatoes to reach the cart? Or Julie sees that bitch Brenda passing below her window. Should she aim directly at, before, or after Brenda to hit her with her pink cell phone?

The textbook's random attempts at non-sports examples include seagulls dropping seashells, tourists dropping cameras, and popping champagne corks. Any other suggestions? Til then, I'll stick with "the disgruntled physics student throws her textbook out her window at an angle..."