my weekend should be a lot of calc grading, a lot of multivar studying, a lot of polyhedral fan drawing, and idk hopefully i'll have some time to knit or something
just makes me very angry, like "really, your students have a hard time understanding 3+ dimensions in MVC? It's almost like... there should be a course... where the whole point... was to give an intuition about higher dimensions..."
i mean idk i get the sense that a lot of the students had, like, really anal high school math teachers who would mark them down for stupid shit so now they pay way too much attention to the stupid shit
because i think they try to motivate it but it just doesn't make any sense?
like "okay let's say you're a farmer and you want to fence in your cows and you want to spend the least amount of money on the fencing" uhhhh okay sure
For me I always feel weird about ragging on it because some of that can be attributed to pseudocontext but some of it is actual context but just distracting
And I don't know if the distracting is just a me thing
I mean it is clear that some context is just totally irrelevant to the problem: classic "how fast is the volume of the balloon expanding when the radius is 4 in"
i mean, i guess for me it's that most of it is boring and i feel like i'm being... i dunno, tricked?
because i think they present it as "this is going to become a very useful skill so that's why you're gonna put the effort into learning it!" and i can't tell you how disappointed i was to realize that i didn't ride a lot of trains and train tracks aren't usually completely straight for that long and no one else i knew rode a lot of trains, and basically i was never going to need to calculate how far away i was getting from somebody else while we were both on different trains
i mean, in the first place, when was i ever going to ask that question? let alone have the right conditions under which the skills i learned in calc or whatever were going to be sufficient to help me answer it?
i mean, i dunno, the fact that derivatives and whatever tell us a lot of interesting stuff is like, already cool enough for me to sit down and be willing to learn it
honestly a big part of high school was realizing that "when is this information ever going to help me in life" was a useless question and i knew that i wanted to graduate so that was enough motivation to learn boring shit
or, shit that was taught poorly but might have been interesting otherwise
i mean, that's the thing, i feel like most people who end up majoring in math right out of high school had some kind of, like, chance encounter with good math or one of those Lifechanging Math Teachers (TM) or something like that
i definitely had good math teachers but i would say that they could've been better if they weren't kind of stuck with the lackluster curriculum
i also got to take calculus with a college professor (as opposed to AP) and i think that helped
i mean, i'm sure you'd say the same thing about getting to take ranal and absal?
i dunno, i was thinking about how funny it is that my high school had, like, this thing with the community college so that a professor would come in and teach the class every day, which was great for the Good At Math squad
but i think it's really funny because, like, i knew so many people who were just following that track because it was the natural progression and they didn't hate math, so they graduated having taken calculus, linear, and discrete math
i wasn't smart enough for the last two but i knew a lot of folks who ended up doing that
and majoring in, like, animation, english, polisci, history
