Sath

[Churchill]

My calculus teacher marked me off for every problem on our test because I didn't write:

Lim
x->c

or

d/dx

or

show work using calculus rules (i think he wanted a proof every time I used one)

on every step of my work.

I guess I am a C calculus student now.

[BerenTebogo]

Hard to gauge the stupidity or not of teacher without seeing your work. Could go either way. If you took the derivative of something without indicating that you were taking a derivative, and just wrote some expression, I'd probably just be like lolno.

Also depends on the level of calculus / environment. Are you in a heavy engineering school? A heavy theory school? Etc. If it's a math department that is pretty much pure math and they don't have to answer to a large engineering department browbeating the department over the curriculum as they try to shove hundreds of dumbass engineers through calc1-3 every year, then yeah, you may have to bite the bullet and be rigorous.

Should take a picture and see how / what you were marked off for, can probably get a good idea of what the rest of your semester will be like from that, lol.

[Churchill]

No you're right, I already know it's going to be awful and I don't really care as long as I don't have to take it again.

He's a math teacher with a math degree, so rigorous mathematics and attention to detail, all that jazz. I mean, I'm basically doing these tests with my basic TI from 1998 because we can't use 84/NSpire.

My last math teacher with a math degree used to mark me wrong for not being a good artist on graphs, lol.

[BerenTebogo]

That sucks, but big range on math teacher and math degree. Depends on if they are pure theorist or applied math, the latter is usually better to teach non-math majors.

Also, maybe you're being asked silly questions, but what are you using a calculator for in calculus? The only times I've had to use a calculator in college were times where the professors were ultra shit. Nobody should be asking you to do computation on an exam in 2015.

One of the math teachers at my undergrad taught a differential equations course one year and let students use mathematica, wolframalpha, etc all on the test and submit their notebooks or written work. Was good cuz people who still didn't know wtf couldn't cheese it.

Is calc 1 the farthest you have to go for math? If not, there is something to be said for gaining a bit of a deeper understanding of what is going on while you're still in the shallow end of limits and derivatives. Don't want to end up in vector calculus without good fundamentals.

[Churchill]

I'm a physics major nigga, calc+physics ery semester.

I prefer math teachers who let you use other resources or even note cards, mostly cause I'm old. You get good at math by doing tons of problems by hand and seeing them in various ways/understanding the concepts and why something is what it is. A notecard or other resource isn't really helpful if you don't understand anything beyond plugging things into a formula.

Having to remember every trig theorem for every test because fuck it, you don't know that tan(a+b)=tan(a)+tan(b) / 1-tan(a)tan(b) is not a good way to teach IMO.

Maybe it's cause I'm almost 30 now and memorization seems dumb as hell considering calculators and real life doesn't require you to do so.


As far as calculators, I like using them because I don't like doing math in my head and it lets me focus on the problem as a whole. Like I know that (2X-5) doesn't exist at X=5/2 (probably too simple of an example) but I'd rather just punch it in a calculator and see it so I can move on.

[BerenTebogo]

Oh you're majoring in physics? Probably for the best you break down and give in to adhering to the minutia, even if it seems tedious.

The memorization is whatever, some stuff (like most of the trig identities), will end up being memorized just because you have to use them so much. But as a general rule, I completely agree with you.

That said, you will reach a point in your physics career even as an undergrad where there will be a large and noticeable gap between the people who really, truly understand the math and those who don't. You don't want to be playing catch-up on stuff you've already learned when you're in quantum mechanics or even advanced classical mechanics.

Depending on what physics electives you take, you may or may not get really thrashed, but yeah...I promise you, there is going to be a wall where all your physical intuition completely fails and the only way to survive is by understanding the math very, very well.

I'm turning 30 in about 2 months and I'm still in grad school so I know those feels. There are classes I slack ass in as much as humanly possible because I know the level of math / discipline of physics is completely irrelevant to my work (see: stat mech) but they still need to be passed. Grad school really illuminated the difference between the people who majored in physics and math and the people who only majored in physics. Seen some smart ass kids with their eyes full glossed over in grad quantum / math physics.

Protip #1 for the rest of your entire degree: Learning Linear Algebra to a deep level is more important than anything else. Linear Algebra will take you farther and be more heavily depended upon than any other single area of physics or math. Take the class as soon as humanly possible when you can actually make time in your life to absorb it, then take higher levels of it if offered. I took LA, Adv LA, and grad Numerical LA all as an undergrad. Best decision I've ever made.

[BerenTebogo]

And also, it may be annoying, but at higher levels of physics it will generally be assumed you can do all of calc1/2 and every trig identity you've ever learned off the top of your head. The stuff is heavily emphasized in E&M and classical mechanics. Very, very, very trig and integral heavy.

[Churchill]

oh man, i fucking hate matrices

[Churchill]

Honestly if you picked that and synthetic division (didn't even teach that when I was in HS) you'd pick the two things I don't fucking know at all.

[Churchill]

That said, and I could be wrong, but didn't a lot of the breakthroughs in QM/QED come from matrices?

[BerenTebogo]

Synthetic division is 110% ass. I still don't understand it.

QM could basically be renamed "Applied Linear Algebra featuring Electrons!" And it wouldn't be the slightest bit wrong. That's one of the reasons it is super beneficial to get out ahead of it. Nothing like learning brand new math, being expected to be able to use it at a high level, at the same time as you learn about physics which shits all over everything you know about classical physics.

But not only is LA super important for a ton of areas of physics and math, depending on what you want to do with your degree, a vast chunk of the really cool tech/defense/computing fields depend heavily on applied math methods based almost entirely in LA.

Fun example: every facial recognition, finger print matching, netflix suggestion, google search result, etc comes as a result of matching / filtering algorithms that are, behind all the code, just sorting operations on matrices made up of columns/rows of data that, when given quantifiable information, adjusts the value of how well or not any one column is correlated to another column. The correlations between columns allows for a probabilistic analysis of how likely or unlikely of a match one thing is to another.

It goes pretty far down the rabbit hole, but when I took NLA we had to do final projects and like talk for 30 minutes on our projects, one guy wrote a basic facial recognition code off of a sample data set from some alphabet soup govt website. Was hilariously simple, yet it worked really well.

tl;dr: matrices are hugely powerful and a firm understanding of LA will trivialize almost all of undergrad QM.

[BerenTebogo]

Oh, I also had to reteach myself partial fractions like 6 hours ago to do a power series expansion of a complex-valued function. Haven't used partial fractions since like...my first semester of undergrad for like 1 week total, then never again.

Was staring at that shit like it was brail or something. Was ridiculous.

[Mertron]

nerds

[Churchill]

We know that birds can see magnets because of matrices yo

[Churchill]

we also know that you taste quantum vibrations

[BaneTheBrawler]

nerds

[Darkslitter]

C calculus student now.

Are you an anime character or do you just have a stutter?

Btw Sath did you know Fortei grew up to be a teacher?

While I was doing my student teaching, I taught Adv. Algebra, my overseeing teacher was a moron. He would give out quizzes that determined 40% of your grade, a midterm for 25%, and a final for 25%. The homework was a completion grade that he did at the beginning of class, and it could have been their french homework for all my teacher cared. The students were taught a subject for a week and then quizzed over the subject matter for that week, and that was the last time their knowledge was tested until the test. So, there was no way for the students to know if they understood the material until they got their quiz back, and no place to show improvement until the next exam. When I took over, I graded their homework and handed it back to them (still a completion score) and on my quizzes I'd always have an extra credit question to counter act the fact that their teacher didn't give a fuck. If the quiz was too long, the extra credit question would be a directions check like "Draw a star next problem 9." One such quiz, my extra credit question was "Write your favorite Will Farrel quote at the bottom of the page." A student wrote the quote from The Other Guys, "If I were a lion and you were a tuna, I would swim out in the ocean and freaking eat you." and I attached the whole response quote on a separate page onto his quiz:

Spoiler: show

Allen Gamble: OK, first off: a lion, swimming in the ocean. Lions don't like water. If you placed it near a river or some sort of fresh water source, that make sense. But you find yourself in the ocean, 20 foot wave, I'm assuming off the coast of South Africa, coming up against a full grown 800 pound tuna with his 20 or 30 friends, you lose that battle, you lose that battle 9 times out of 10. And guess what, you've wandered into our school of tuna and we now have a taste of lion. We've talked to ourselves. We've communicated and said 'You know what, lion tastes good, let's go get some more lion'. We've developed a system to establish a beach-head and aggressively hunt you and your family and we will corner your pride, your children, your offspring.
Terry Hoitz: How you gonna do that?
Allen Gamble: We will construct a series of breathing apparatus with kelp. We will be able to trap certain amounts of oxygen. It's not gonna be days at a time. An hour? Hour forty-five? No problem. That will give us enough time to figure out where you live, go back to the sea, get some more oxygen, and stalk you. You just lost at your own game. You're outgunned and out-manned.
[pause]
Allen Gamble: Did that go the way you thought it was gonna go? Nope.

and on the back of that page I wrote, "Nathan, stop talking in class." When he got his quiz back, he started reading it out loud and in my stern teacher voice I shouted, "NATHAN. Turn that page over"


This other girl who didn't like me very much wrote in french on her homework "This class makes me want to kill myself." So to troll her, I pulled her aside after class and in my most concerning voice had a talk to "make sure everything was all right and that she could come to me at any time."


Someone asked my opinion about guns and I gave them the joker, "Guns are too quick, you can't saver all the little emotions....that's why I prefer a knife." it was a small town and batman had just came out. Some of the students got it, but a lot looked pretty mortified.

[Churchill]

how about i make you confirmed kill 301

[Darkslitter]

"Confirmed Kill 301" sounds like some anime thing and you didn't stutter, thanks for clearing that up for me.

[BerenTebogo]

Are you an anime character or do you just have a stutter?

Btw Sath did you know Fortei grew up to be a teacher?

While I was doing my student teaching, I taught Adv. Algebra, my overseeing teacher was a moron. He would give out quizzes that determined 40% of your grade, a midterm for 25%, and a final for 25%. The homework was a completion grade that he did at the beginning of class, and it could have been their french homework for all my teacher cared. The students were taught a subject for a week and then quizzed over the subject matter for that week, and that was the last time their knowledge was tested until the test. So, there was no way for the students to know if they understood the material until they got their quiz back, and no place to show improvement until the next exam. When I took over, I graded their homework and handed it back to them (still a completion score) and on my quizzes I'd always have an extra credit question to counter act the fact that their teacher didn't give a fuck. If the quiz was too long, the extra credit question would be a directions check like "Draw a star next problem 9." One such quiz, my extra credit question was "Write your favorite Will Farrel quote at the bottom of the page." A student wrote the quote from The Other Guys, "If I were a lion and you were a tuna, I would swim out in the ocean and freaking eat you." and I attached the whole response quote on a separate page onto his quiz:

Spoiler: show

Allen Gamble: OK, first off: a lion, swimming in the ocean. Lions don't like water. If you placed it near a river or some sort of fresh water source, that make sense. But you find yourself in the ocean, 20 foot wave, I'm assuming off the coast of South Africa, coming up against a full grown 800 pound tuna with his 20 or 30 friends, you lose that battle, you lose that battle 9 times out of 10. And guess what, you've wandered into our school of tuna and we now have a taste of lion. We've talked to ourselves. We've communicated and said 'You know what, lion tastes good, let's go get some more lion'. We've developed a system to establish a beach-head and aggressively hunt you and your family and we will corner your pride, your children, your offspring.
Terry Hoitz: How you gonna do that?
Allen Gamble: We will construct a series of breathing apparatus with kelp. We will be able to trap certain amounts of oxygen. It's not gonna be days at a time. An hour? Hour forty-five? No problem. That will give us enough time to figure out where you live, go back to the sea, get some more oxygen, and stalk you. You just lost at your own game. You're outgunned and out-manned.
[pause]
Allen Gamble: Did that go the way you thought it was gonna go? Nope.

and on the back of that page I wrote, "Nathan, stop talking in class." When he got his quiz back, he started reading it out loud and in my stern teacher voice I shouted, "NATHAN. Turn that page over"


This other girl who didn't like me very much wrote in french on her homework "This class makes me want to kill myself." So to troll her, I pulled her aside after class and in my most concerning voice had a talk to "make sure everything was all right and that she could come to me at any time."


Someone asked my opinion about guns and I gave them the joker, "Guns are too quick, you can't saver all the little emotions....that's why I prefer a knife." it was a small town and batman had just came out. Some of the students got it, but a lot looked pretty mortified.

I played XIV with Jeff for like a year. He's still chatting away in our group FC FB chat right now actually. Hilarious that he is a teacher.