I think you forgot to write "/walloftext" :)

Anyway, for the last time (I sound like a broken record), the math you do is analogous to grammar worksheets in English, so you are not making a reasonable comparison. You may have gotten a taste of proof writing in geometry, but it sounds at least like you just memorized these anyway so did not really embrace the whole point of the process.

You just described how you would try to explain Shakespeare to someone, just as abgemacht has offered to tutor you. You have rejected that tutoring. Would you easily accept someone not caring about Shakespeare because they have trouble with the vocabulary? Because you shouldnt.

My friend is fine now. He just had a bad ear infection and was sleep deprived and had just tried coffee for the first time that week and I think it was just the perfect storm of craziness.

I have no college deficiencies : )

@obi

Like anything else, you need a base set of skills before you can doing anything

You need to know spelling & grammar before you can write. You need to know factorizing before you can do real math.

And, once again, by the way you're describing what you're trying to do, I know you're completely missing the point of what you're trying to learn.

Saying something like, "I had the right answer in a pile of wrong answers; I just chose the wrong one," does *not* indicate that you have any understanding of the concepts.

Maybe it's a shock to everyone...

But I hated doing grammar worksheets just as much as I hate doing factoring! XD

Both are so tedious...so I don't know, for all I know, I might have been able to see what you all see in math if I'd ever gotten past the "grammar" point, but since I just need to pass nine more weeks and then I'm free, I just want to ride this out...maybe someday I'll take you up on that offer, abgemacht, and you can show me what you find so beautiful in math, but for right now, I just want to finish it out (as well as be thankful for the fact that I'm at least good at something and can reach into the literary and philosophical world...I never needed grammar worksheets, I hated those--I actually remember doing poorer at times in Grammar than Math just because I'd be so pissed at having to do these busy-work sheets I'd blow them off to go and read some more or watch some baseball--and never really needed them, I can't remember a time where I DIDN'T understand essential grammar, so either I just picked it up from reading very early or else maybe it was natural to an extent, either way, I just HATED Grammar, so if that's the analogy here, that Factoring=Math Grammar, I can see why I hate it so and everyone else sees it as just the tedious tip of the iceberg--although I don't fully grasp the vocabulary and grammar of Italian or musical composition, and yet I can still get into a Mozart or Puccini opera, so I still think that maybe my doing better with Literature than Math is due to the former, whatever the language, being rooted in something more human than Math, which is more objective, but oh well...

Betrand Russell wrote a book called "Principles of Mathematics" I was thinking of getting once, before it vanished off the store's shelf--I wound up getting John Stuart Mill and David Hume instead to solidify my love of philosophy once and for all...fate?--but if that book ever pops up, maybe I'll take a peek and see what philosophy and intrigue he found in Math...if anyone knows, feel free to tell me--just don't be surprised if I don't understand a word you say.)

:)

And @abgemacht:

Well, I think in that particular case I had the right method down, FOIL, do this and this to get the right combination, so I figured there had to be a set number of combinations possible given teh confines of the problem, and so if I jsut kept going I'd eventually run across the right one, and eventually I did, I just overlooked it, I guess.

But yeah, I do mostly try to memorize a method for a test and move on, I suppose...that works fine for me in Lit. classes, just skim whatever I'm reading or, if I have conflicting things to read and not enough time--as I do now sometimes with 4 English classes--I just don't read the passage, go off of what I know of the author, material, style, and so on--which is usually a fair amount--and try and connect it in class discussions to something that applies to quite a bit of literature, Shakespeare or Homer or a Marxist or Nietzschean interpretation, and so on...and that usually works, even when I just "memorize" a passage from what I've read I can give it context, so I don't know why I can't do that with Math, or retain it as I can Literature, but oh well...it works for Literature, and actually for Biology it worked pretty well, too, memorizing the concept and then just using common sense or prior knowledge to give it context, so Math is just...annoying to study for in that regard.

I never study for ANY tests, except Math, I just never need to, and if I'm flimsy on something, a 10-minute refresher before the test almost never fails...

Math is just the odd thorn in my side.)

(And if what I'm doing is "not real math, but the grammar," WHY am I never told what this wonderful "real math" is? In English, at least, you suffer through pointless grammar rehashing time and again, but AT LEAST that's not the whole class, it's generally part of a class period in, say, 10th grade, and then the second half is some reading of real literature, and HW's a mix.

10th grade was "Julius Caesar"--which is a tough one to really rank for me, sometimes it comes across as being way too straightfoward to rank with the Big Four of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, and yet Antony's speech is one of the best in Shakespeare, arguably the best eulogy in Shakespeare, and there's some other great political intrigue that, if followed through to "Antony and Cleopatra" and considering the political climate in England when the play was written, can give the work a whole new layer of depth--so while half a class might be boring, tedious work identifying a predicate, the second half of a class period would be reading Shakespeare, so at least you'd get a sense of scope, that this grammar junk, learned already as I had it or learning as others were, is setting up for REAL Literature...Shakespeare, and Steinbeck and "Cyrano de bergerac," if I recall.

So where's this REAL Math to give this context? Because without it, it's just an abstract puzzle that I really couldn't care less for or about...

@obiwanobiwan Sorry, math major here, but you are "never told what this wonderful 'real math' is" because the politicians don't want you to, and because the people who advise the politicians don't understand it.

I'm sure that for most people, solving the quadratic equation or finding the linear regression has many more uses than does abstract algebra :). That is not to say that most American / Western European school math curricula do not require much, much more rigor and abstraction. If people saw how everything derived from certain formal definitions and such, it wouldn't just be "learn how to do this type of problem" or "memorize this formula" or even, worst of all, "memorize this proof." It's funny, really: people can't prove anything themselves after a high school geometry course. They just memorized the steps.

The comparison to grammar, is of course, valid. The "wonderful 'real math'" you're talking about I would instead compare to critical theory. (At least in a post-structuralist model, ) language is social and quite arbitrary. The same way, we apply a pure mathematical model to certain real-world aspects in a way that is just as arbitrary.

Maybe they wanted us to learn how to expand the parentheses (or identify the predicate) to show us an instance of this abstract base, but they are doing it wrong because the focus is on taking these rules for granted and applying them to even more arbitrary things.

Well, not understanding what you can do with math is really a failure on your instructors' parts. As I've said, math is often taught very poorly.

I would consider Geometry, Trig, and Algebra to be like the basics that you need to know in order to build off of. I'd consider Calculus to be the first real math course, where you start to see the real power and beauty.

And, eventually, you end up with something truly wonderful like ΔxΔp>=ħ/2

Would it hurt your feelings if Im told you I have absolutely no idea what those symbols even ARE or are supposed to mena, abgemacht? (Hopefully no more than if you told me that you didn't know what 14 lines ending in a rhymed couplet equates to?) ;)

And @mehpisto:

Yep, I come from the "memorize the formulas" school of training, if that's what it is...

Out of curiosity, since everyone knows I'm from Southern California, where's everybody else from/where'd you go to college? I'd be interested to see if this is due to California being 48th in education or my own ignorance (or both, as I think uclabb is a UCer...just a wild guess...) :p

I'm from Mass, which has pretty good primary and secondary education and mine was particularly good.

It means that when you multiply the uncertainty of position by the uncertainty of momentum together, it's always greater than the constant hbar/2 (just a number). In other words, you can never know a particles *exact* position and momentum simultaneously.

Also, are you referring to a Shakespearean Sonnet?

@obiwan

uclabb = ucla basketball. I grew up loving John Wooden and just UCLA basketball as a whole. Steve Lavin and Baron Davis and such beauty. I am from San Diego and went to high school there but now go to school in Boston.

@abgemacht:

So that equation's somewhat like the one that says you can know the location or movement of an electron, but enver both, the Eisenberg/Heisenberg Principle or something (which I've only heard of because of the "Heisenberg Compensators" Geordi talks about to "fix" that problem for transporting people in Star Trek.) :P

And just one more reason to wish and hope I make it to the NY/Boston area someday...

And yp, Shakespearean Sonnet (technically it can count as just any sonnet, as even a Petrarchan sonnet can end in a rhyming couplet, but yes, associated and notable far more in the Shakespearean/Spenserian Sonnet.)

And even uclabb is in the Boston area...lol (though basketball's the only major sport that doesn't appeal to me, scoring is too easy or, to be more fair and to the point, so much scoring occurs it seems less "special" or "significant;" when a run is scored in a baseball game or a goal in hockey--and as I learned this last summer, in soccer--it REALLY matters and is notable, as many games are 1-2 run/goal games, so each one counts, and they're rare...and even in the NFL, a 35-28 game is really just 5-4 touchdown-wise...but a 100-88 basketball game comes out to 50-44 signifying points, nearly 100! That's more than the amount of minutes in the GAME! I can remember all the runs in a baseball or hockey game; most everyone will forget Kobe's baskets made in the 1st quarter by the 4th, they're just lost in the shuffle...I personally love baseball the msot because it has no clock, you MUST give the other team it's fair crack, whether it's 10-1 or 1-0, each side WILL have equal shots at the plate to score, so you can't run out the clock or play keep-away with the ball...one of my favorite games was played last year, my New York Mets against the St. Louis Cardinals on the same day my friend had her last play, ending our "generation's" run at my former HS...5 1/2 hour game, 20 innings! I was watching and listening to it before aND after the play! And even crazier...the Mets won 2-1! 20 innings, and the score was 2-1, and yet inning after inning they kept coming so close to scoring it may well have been a Cardinals blowout time after time, but the Mets weren't rsuhed by a clock, so they stayed their ground and kept making plays and kept on going and going until they did it! And ALL of those 3 runs in the 2-1 score were huge, rather than a 112-96 score.) :)

Name: Baskineli
Rank: Not in the army anymore...

I have a B.Sc in Nuclear Engineering and an MBA.

Interesting experience: I have started my own business a few months ago, based on Drupal platform (yes, I know a good deal of PHP, SQL and other languages - sort of autodidact).

I know you don't want to argue about the merits of sports, but there are three reasons I like basketball:
1. It is the most fun to play. (I actually think this is fairly objectively true at least in comparison to baseball, football, and soccer)
2. I think that a grat basketball athlete is the ideal athlete. Except for the occasional gangly 7'5 guy, every basketball player is an elite athletic specimen. This certainly isn't true for basketball and football and, while all soccer players are in shape, there is too much finesse and not enough raw athleticism for my taste. You shouldn't be able to beat up your favorite athlete.
3. Basketball si the only sport in which you score about half the time. This makes each and every possession an even and intense battle for success, with one team stepping up to score (or stop the other team). In soccer, for example, pretty much in order to score not only does the offensive player have to do really well, but the defensive player has to screw up, and that isn't as fun to me, personally.

obi,
You seem to like philosophy. Isn't math just an attempt to bring more certainty to the Aristotelian philosophy that dominated classical and medieval Europe? If you look at the work of Bacon and Descartes, I think you'll find that they are attempting to answer the same questions as the traditional philosopher of the time, and of course these two were very influential in bringing about the Scientific Revolution from which modern mathematics has arisen. I admit I haven't read all your posts in this thread, but I thought I'd through this out there to answer your concerns about the value of "higher mathematics" as opposed to the "human element" of philosophy/English.
Also, factoring is used to find the zeros on a graph among other things, which heck, you might find very useful in stats, which I think you mentioned you liked (?).

@jmeyersd:

Yes, I do like philosophy, and I have read Descartes...

However, I did NOT care for him at all once he entered his asserting phase--he deconstructs the issues of human consciousness and even the question of being nicely, "I think, therefore I am" is still one of the most powerful and famous single assertions in all of philosophy, and with good reason, and even his assertion that allowing for uncertainty some logical axioms cannot be tricked, ie, a triangle simply cannot have four sides no matter how you slice it...and then, after all of that, attemps to put the pieces back together with a combination of two of the things I loathe the most in philosophical treatises, a circular argument for God to establish a metaphysical certainty while employing overly-technical mathematical accounts to account for the physical--you'll understand why I'm not swayed to Mathematics by his mention. :)

Don't get me wrong, again, Mathematics are important...but it's only one way of looking at things philospophically, and not THE way, not the ESSENTIAL way of looking at things, nothing is, not Literary interpretation, not Scientific, not Political...

How we view things philosophically is like an optomotrist fitting you for glasses:

Some pairs look good to you while I might find them too bulky or to slight, or vice versa, and then, more importantly, depending upon our individual SIGHTS--ie, abilities--you might need a pair of glasses that, if I put them on, would make everything appear blurry, and my pair of glasses might appear blurry to you.



Hence the reason Descartes and Nietzsche are so different in their styles--the God sentiments and the overall Cartesian Method is repugnant to a thinker like Nietzsche, as it leaves little room for the kind of Dionysian forces and Ubermenschen individuals he'd like to champion, and by contrast, those Dionysian forces and Ubermensch that Nietzsche hails as great forces of change and, perhaps, even progress are condemned in a Cartesian view as something distracting or even dangerous to Descartes' highly-structured, very-Appolonian belief.

By that same stretch, then, the approach via Mathematics for me, be iy due to poor teaching, poor abilitiy, a dislike of the method itself, or a combination of the three--and that's probably the closest to how I really feel--is something I don't care for, a cloudy lens, and the Englightenment lens often appears very rose-tinted to me, hence my preference for the "Epic" lens of the Literary family...

Hence the reason I mention Shakespeare, Sophocles, Homer, King Arthur, and Nietzsche so much--all wrote or praised the idea of a story that's epic in scale.

A sense of epicness that I feel is undercut by what I see as dry and often-lifeless numerals--whether or not that's, again, due to poor training or just my opinion, the fact remains...that's just my opinion, it's by no means an engraved-in-a-tablet Commandment I expect you all to conform to.

:)

(Incidentally, apparently I have an Honors paper on Shakespeare due in two days...

Didn't know about it until just now...but I have a feeling I'll be able to bang out a few pages on the plays given--R&J and Othello, plus whatever the hell else I feel like throwing in--rather quickly...) ;)

that's because you are a JEAN-NEE-US! Go Obi.

@obi

I feel we've gotten all out of this conversation as we can; however, I would like to end with this:

Math is hard. Even people who are "good" at math are that way more so through hard work than innate ability. And, just because you're good at, say Abstract Algebra, does not mean you're good at Statistics, or Differential Equations. Math is a rigorous and diverse field that one masters through hard work and diligence.


Now, I agree that there are different levels of aptitude towards math, but it is very rare that anyone "just gets it." Even Einstein reached a point where he got stuck with math; if he hadn't, there'd be nothing left to learn about the universe. So, if you're used to skimming through passages to get the gist of the content and you rarely study for exams, then, yes, you are going to fail at math, because very, very few people can do that.