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> "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have" It's my main complaint with how maths and physics were taught in school. I didn't unders
by mopsi 6y ago
> "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have"
It's my main complaint with how maths and physics were taught in school. I didn't understand electricity, trigonometry, integrals etc until long after school when I started tinkering with microcontrollers and robots, and had to solve real-world problems. Then, suddenly all those concepts sprung into life and got real meaning with clear and observable effects.
The only standout was my biology teacher, a former agronomist at a major food producer (rare to encounter someone with real experience), who made us do all sorts of practical things. I particularly remember a display of sugar in drinks that we put together: each of us had to bring a bottle, and he gave us glasses and made us fill them with sugar to match the content written on the food label. That was the day I stopped drinking juice.
- acqq 6y agoGood story. Reminds me of a great story by Neil Stephenson about his experience of learning by doing the experiments: https://youtu.be/_J4QPz52Sfo&t=4511 https://youtu.be/_J4QPz52Sfo&t=4511
- gregsadetsky 6y agoThat hyperlink did not work for me -- I think that you wanted to post https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J4QPz52Sfo&t=4511 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J4QPz52Sfo&t=4511 ? (just listened -- great story) :-)
- acqq 6y agoYes, that's correct, thanks for finding it fast! I have obviously constucted the youtu.be link incorrectly: there should have been "?" instead of "&" in the link. The correct short form should be https://youtu.be/_J4QPz52Sfo?t=4511 https://youtu.be/_J4QPz52Sfo?t=4511
- tempestn 6y agoMost of my engineering degree felt like that. I especially remember control systems classes where we learned all kinds of details of how to run the math to place poles and zeros blah blah, sometimes even with some incredibly simplistic example of launching a rocket and controlling its trajectory or something, but... you just never felt like you had any idea how/when/why you would use this stuff in a real work environment. (And once I graduated I discovered that almost no one does; at best they're using basic PID controllers. I doubt even the professors could have given real life examples of the more complex stuff in use.)
- eythian 6y agoI agree with this. I was always a bit of a science nerd, even in primary school. But was just never any good at maths, ending up in the bottom stream in intermediate. It wasn't till part way through that that I started self-teaching myself programming (I had a 40 minute wait for the school bus, and a teacher who gave me an Apple II programming manual along with a BASIC disk, so a good start) that all of a sudden this maths had a place in my brain to go, made sense, and all of a sudden I was getting 90%+ in tests. These days I can read a bunch of docs and make a start at something, but I still really like having a problem to solve in order to synthesise the information into understanding.