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That doesn't make sense to me. In a group of 90 people there can be more than 9 of them who strive to learn. I get not making classes an "easy A", but making an

That doesn't make sense to me. In a group of 90 people there can be more than 9 of them who strive to learn. I get not making classes an "easy A", but making an intro class that difficult arbitrarily seems against the entire point of education.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Others might call it "gate keeping", but that implies an intent that I don't think is really there. I think instead that the math professors think everyone else is like them, learn like they did. I'm kind of dumb and so things as abstract as higher math have come to me with difficulty. I find I have to truly understand a thing before I can possibly expect to remember it or use it. And apparently I am not quick to understand things like differentiation, integration. I think I only grasped matrix multiplication, linear algebra when I tried to write a flight simulator from scratch (well, from a book actually, but it had you start from scratch with your own Bresenham algorithm for line drawing, write your own polygon clipping code, face culling, etc.). I have done pretty good (I must say) in helping my daughters get through high school math though since I do understand it (now). I think it helps that I probably approach teaching the concept as though it is to someone, like me, who is not going to make the mental leap to abstraction. I suspect many professional math teachers/majors don't suffer my shortcomings and don't teach from that vantage point.
- mysterydip 5y ago
  I agree that there's a difference between learning and understanding, in a similar vein I wrote my own 3D renderer and really understood matrix multiplication. But say you and I were in the same class, but only one was allowed to pass, even though we both now understand how things work. One of us has to take it again or change paths for no reason.
- drks91 5y ago
  Which book it was?
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I believe this one: https://archive.org/details/build-your-own-flight-sim-in-c-dos-game-dev-michael-radtke-chris-lampton https://archive.org/details/build-your-own-flight-sim-in-c-d... Yeah, that is it. The year is about right too. I was programming Macs so I skipped over a lot of the PC-specific stuff. But the math is all there.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Others might call it "gate keeping", but that implies an intent that I don't think is really there. I think instead that the math professors think everyone else is like them, learn like they did. I'm kind of dumb and so things as abstract as higher math have come to me with difficulty. I find I have to truly understand a thing before I can possibly expect to remember it or use it. And apparently I am not quick to understand things like differentiation, integration. I think I only grasped matrix multiplication, linear algebra when I tried to write a flight simulator from scratch (well, from a book actually, but it had you start from scratch with your own Bresenham algorithm for line drawing, write your own polygon clipping code, face culling, etc.). I have done pretty good (I must say) in helping my daughters get through high school math though since I do understand it (now). I think it helps that I probably approach teaching the concept as though it is to someone, like me, who is not going to make the mental leap to abstraction. I suspect many professional math teachers/majors don't suffer my shortcomings and don't teach from that vantage point.

mysterydip 5y ago
I agree that there's a difference between learning and understanding, in a similar vein I wrote my own 3D renderer and really understood matrix multiplication. But say you and I were in the same class, but only one was allowed to pass, even though we both now understand how things work. One of us has to take it again or change paths for no reason.
drks91 5y ago
Which book it was?
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I believe this one: https://archive.org/details/build-your-own-flight-sim-in-c-dos-game-dev-michael-radtke-chris-lampton https://archive.org/details/build-your-own-flight-sim-in-c-d... Yeah, that is it. The year is about right too. I was programming Macs so I skipped over a lot of the PC-specific stuff. But the math is all there.