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Favourite Number? This poll is closed. |
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| 420 |
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29 | 47.54% |
| 69 |
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32 | 52.46% |
| Total: | 61 votes | ||
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Caesar Saladin posted:They made us do some weird rear end visual thing in elementary school called the lattice method that I immediately forgot. It took way longer and I already knew how to multiply. I can't even be bothered parsing exactly how its done from this picture. You want to do 948 * 827 in this picture. You draw a 3 x 3 square, with the digits 9, 4, 8 along the row, and 8, 2, 7 along the columns. Each square is divided in half. To populate a square, you do the digit of the column times the digit of the row. The tens digit of your product goes in the upper half of your square, while the ones digit goes in the lower half. Then, to calculate the final product, you add along the diagonals that the subdivision forms, and read the answer off the other half of the square, in this instance, 783,996. It's ultimately equivalent to the standard algorithm for multi-digit multiplication, but has some advantages in that you don't need to keep track of carrying digits until the final sum, unlike the standard algorithm. I have one student who uses it exclusively to multiply numbers and he is much, much faster with it than the good students are with the standard algorithm. Hard to justify teaching since the cultural primacy of the standard algorithm means that one needs to be taught and, frankly, why teach more than one method.
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Aug 9, 2019 04:57
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I just had teachers who would put stuff on the board and say "that's how it is." I floundered through math for a long time and wound up having to bumblefuck through AP Geometry and Pre-Cal. I would understand what they were putting on the board but once the tests came around with the little curveballs, I would bomb because nobody ever explained what the reason was behind it. My 8th grade math teacher was a 24 year old dude right out of college who basically got bullied by the girls in the class who would harass him and rummage through his desk to find cigarettes. One day he was on the phone with his girlfriend before class started and some of the girls stole the receiver to talk to her. I think she ended up dumping him over it. He once told us he had to take "happy pills" because of our class, and once just blurted "y'all gonna make me lose my mind up in here, up in here" Freshman algebra teacher in high school would make us chant "I LIKE MATH, I NEED MATH" every day Then my senior year of high school, the AP calculus teacher was explaining how some formula was derived and why you use it. Suddenly 12 years of math fell in to place and everything made sense. I struggled with a stats class in college, but otherwise, I can now rapidly do a lot of math in my head. Obligatory coach as teacher story: I took a sociology class one year, and the teacher was the football coach. He had each student pick a chapter from the syllabus and do a presentation covering it. That was it. That was the whole class, and while we were doing our presentations, he was writing playbooks at his desk. Then he gave us the standardized test from the book, and the presentations didn't cover half the stuff that was on it. My buddy picked the chapter on "mass media" and his presentation was a 3 minute speech followed by showing "The Ring"
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Aug 9, 2019 04:57
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Arrhythmia posted:Lattice method I can actually see how that'd be useful, thanks for the explanation! I struggled a lot with multi-digit multiplication in elementary school, because no one could explain to me how or why you added zeros underneath the product line. Made it all the way to university before I finally understood what the hell they were doing, and by then I never had to manually compute products anymore.
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Aug 9, 2019 05:42
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My English teacher tried to make us know words and right. loving boomers!!!
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Aug 9, 2019 05:49
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i had the same math teacher for 7th, 9th, 10th, and 12th grade math. most of us were terrified of this man. he dressed and acted like michael douglas in Falling Down. he made this one thuggish ruggish cruster kid with chains and a KoRn shirt cry one day my sophomore year by calling him a Kelphead over and over. he was a good teacher though, we all got 5s in our AP exams. saw him a couple years ago outside of school. he seemed more mellow since retiring.
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Aug 9, 2019 06:25
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Schweinhund posted:My English teacher tried to make us know words and right. loving boomers!!! given the thread title, how good a job do you think they did teaching reading comprehension
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Aug 9, 2019 06:27
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im uncomfortable with people sniffing my rear end so i'm gonna vote 420 and math was always really patronizing, i hate the "show your work" poo poo. like i know the loving answer, don't make me show a doctorate proof for it. i'd spend more time figuring out how to 'show my work' instead of actually getting the right answer. edit: i think this is why i started doodling all over my homework, which is how i came to be an artist. cool stuff!
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Aug 9, 2019 06:33
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I had DiffEq on first year of college and for the life of me cannot recall a thing from it or how I aced that particular subject.
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Aug 9, 2019 06:58
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Math is why we invented computers. gently caress math.
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Aug 9, 2019 07:01
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We had a substitute teacher that called us idiots if we were still counting some part of addition or subtraction with our fingers. We were 6 years old. Sorry we didn't memorize all the math.
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Aug 9, 2019 07:09
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I competed in national maths competitions until I met Mrs. B. I skipped yr9 maths to do yr10 maths with her. Got an E. Repeated it, against her advice to move on to yr11 maths. Second time around I got a D-. Favourite memory was how she was solving an equation on the board and didn't get it right, so just shrugged her shoulders and said, "Well, you get the idea!" and gave up on it completely. The textbook wasn't a textbook, just a book full of questions and answers. No workings. No explanations. No hope. As a 36yo I have picked up maths again with video tutorials and not only realized that I can understand it, but that it's actually interesting. I've always enjoyed puzzles, and wow! maths is full of them! Cool! I'm also encouraging my (mid thirties) friend to learn his times tables. Bought him a Wrap Up and he was pretty in to it.
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Aug 9, 2019 10:19
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My 9th grade geometry teacher hated my guts for some reason. I got to class the first day about a minute before the bell rang, so I had the misfortune to get a front and center seat. She took an instant dislike to me. I wasn't your classic disruptive student, I pretty much only spoke or did anything when directly addressed, and I was making As and Bs in the class, but she was constantly on my case for no particular reason. And this was the advanced math class so the students were generally pretty engaged and non-disruptive. It got bad enough that midway through the semester there was a week or so where about a third of the class was her making passive aggressive remarks towards me and me responding in some insolent way. Some other student told their parents about it, who told my parents about it, so they arranged a meeting with her and the principal, who basically just told her to ignore me for the rest of the semester. She'd still occasionally glare daggers at me and I'd like to say I responded with a wink or a thumbs up or something but honestly I was just glad she'd mostly stopped interacting with me. She retired at the end of the semester. got em. When I was in college I took a class called "Advanced Engineering Math" that dealt with stuff like vector calculus and complex numbers. Whenever we had a test I could hear someone in the room quietly sobbing. Also the first time I heard the phrase "Diff EQ" I thought the person said "Diffy Q" and it was supposed to be a "gangsta" way to refer to Dairy Queen. In my defense this was at the height of the "white people trying to talk like Snoop Dogg" period.
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Aug 9, 2019 11:07
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Arrhythmia posted:You want to do 948 * 827 in this picture. You draw a 3 x 3 square, with the digits 9, 4, 8 along the row, and 8, 2, 7 along the columns. Each square is divided in half. To populate a square, you do the digit of the column times the digit of the row. The tens digit of your product goes in the upper half of your square, while the ones digit goes in the lower half. Then, to calculate the final product, you add along the diagonals that the subdivision forms, and read the answer off the other half of the square, in this instance, 783,996. This is way too much explanation for me to consider this a viable way to teach people how to not use calculators.
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Aug 9, 2019 11:28
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Many of my math teachers early on, would turn off all the lights and stand behind the overhead projector simply writing out the solutions to home work problems or copying text book examples for the entire period. As you might imagine it was horribly boring and as a result I was a terrible student until much later in life when I was able to come around to the subject on my own. In fact one of my teachers early in middle school or high school was so bad the parents complained and the union was forced to move her to another school where she was only allowed to teach basic typing skills. Wutang-Yutani CORP fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Aug 9, 2019 |
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Aug 9, 2019 11:54
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i was instructed by legend of mathematics misha gromov but he just kept ranting about orangutans. i can't even count!
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Aug 9, 2019 12:00
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I remember when we started high school, the first thing the math teacher had us do was to take a test so he could see how good we were. The next time he stood aghast in front of us holding the results and basically said "WTF is wrong with you all  ", as something like 90% had failed. And this was elementary school math, nothing weird.Another cool test that like 90% failed was in linear algebra, where the test was 2 hours and had like 50 questions of the type "invert this 5x5 matrix, SHOW YOUR WORK". If you don't know what that is, it basically entails hundreds of arithmetic operations. If you made one mistake you got 0 points, even if you showed that you knew how to do it. I passed but gently caress that poo poo. Also it was on a Saturday.
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Aug 9, 2019 12:12
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Mooey Cow posted:I remember when we started high school, the first thing the math teacher had us do was to take a test so he could see how good we were. The next time he stood aghast in front of us holding the results and basically said "WTF is wrong with you all holy crap lol this is horrific
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Aug 9, 2019 12:21
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My highscool maths teacher was a really cool 50 something year old hippyish math doctorate wizard, who I came to learn after many years of graduating, helped put in motion a me too movement among the girls because of pedo accusations against the gym teacher. 👍
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Aug 9, 2019 12:57
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My college math teacher, being asked to clarify something: That's just how it is!  I failed math because that useless gently caress either couldn't or wouldn't do anything but quote the book directly. I'm not simplifying either, that was literally all he said when asked a question that was vital to understanding why, for example, a certain formula would give a certain outcome. Nastyman fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Aug 9, 2019 |
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Aug 9, 2019 13:45
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colachute posted:This is way too much explanation for me to consider this a viable way to teach people how to not use calculators. It is as much explanation as the standard method for multiplying multi-digit numbers. e: Like, come on dude. It's a paragraph of explanation that you can teach to 9 year olds.
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Aug 9, 2019 13:52
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Lactose Is Wack posted:Many of my math teachers early on, would turn off all the lights and stand behind the overhead projector simply writing out the solutions to home work problems or copying text book examples for the entire period. As you might imagine it was horribly boring and as a result I was a terrible student until much later in life when I was able to come around to the subject on my own. This was my high school math classroom experience. Basically you had to memorize a set of equations every week to pass the test. I thought I was terrible at math until my college classes, at which point it got super easy for me.
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Aug 9, 2019 14:09
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Skypie posted:Freshman algebra teacher in high school would make us chant "I LIKE MATH, I NEED MATH" every day
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Aug 9, 2019 15:50
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My fifth grade math teacher was pretty awesome, but also is the source of one of my biggest life regrets. When I started the school year I was coming from a different school, and was more advanced than the rest of the class. She gave me a test to determine what things I knew. I must have screwed up the fraction division questions, because she gave me a packet starting with that. I’d learned that stuff in fourth grade, so I thought she thought that I was stupid. I started crying and sobbing over it, because hey, I was a goon back then too. Later that year we studied WWII, and the whole grade got herded into the auditorium together. I was like “WTF does math have to do with Hitler?”, until she started talking. Turned out she was a holocaust survivor. She told us some horrifying things she went through, like how the guards would shoot anyone who left the sleeping quarters, so they had to poo poo in wooden soup bowls. Everyone only had one bowl, so they had to wipe the bowls out as best they could and then directly go to have the bowl filled with soup for the morning meal. This woman literally had to eat poo poo to survive, and I had cried in front of her over math placement. I’m still ashamed.
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Aug 9, 2019 22:23
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One substitute teacher had very large breasts. I can count to two now.
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Aug 9, 2019 22:38
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Not so much the way it was taught, but I flat out didn't understand the in-class math assignment one day in 3rd grade and my teacher's response was "Well you're not going to lunch until you finish," which I'm pretty sure is loving illegal. So I'm literally left alone in the classroom to figure it out on my own, I may as well be a chimpanzee trying to learn Sanskrit. I even tried looking up the answer in her teacher's guide but we had the "show your work" horseshit. I think I may have just eaten my lunch there, I don't remember. I don't think I told my parents, either. I regret that now, my mom would have raised holy hell.
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Aug 9, 2019 22:51
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New Chinese professor teaching calculus at the college level. introduce a new concept. Illustrate it by moving through each of the basic steps logically and sequentially. Okay. So far so good, at least I can follow it. Then he would combine like 5 steps at once and just write down the answer. You know, to save time and move on... Except this was followed by answering questions about what he just did for the next 20 minutes. And since his English was terrible, it left us even more confused. Literally the only thing I remember from his class was his bastardized Engrish and poorly translated Chinese idioms: "It's like ah-face ah-ear ah-mouth ah-nose. You can see, you can understand!" All of his students had to find tutoring. Except we had very limited tutors to accommodate his other, higher level courses. It got to the point that the school had to implement an online sign-up and queue system specifically for this one teacher. Instead of firing him, looks like they're keeping him until he's granted tenure. It took 3 math majors from the tutoring center several hours to complete 1 question on his calculus quiz. The $300 text book was just as poor at explaining concepts. gently caress yeah dude, I'm so glad I went into debt for poo poo like this.
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Aug 9, 2019 23:56
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I'm no "SPEAK ENGLISH" chud, but having had a professor who spoke horrible english, I do feel like I was ripped off purely in terms of the money I spent.
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Aug 10, 2019 00:09
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Anyone brought up New Math and Common Core yet???? I always thought I was garbage at math. Turns out rote memorization suck, and, surprise surprise, math is a pretty wide subject and people can be good and bad at different types of maths. I'm a wiz at algebra and discrete math, and suck donkey balls at calculus and anything continuous.
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Aug 10, 2019 01:54
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meat no potatoes posted:As a 36yo I have picked up maths again with video tutorials and not only realized that I can understand it, but that it's actually interesting. I've always enjoyed puzzles, and wow! maths is full of them! Cool! Same. Ended up liking it so much I'm now working on a joint math and astrophysics degree. Numeracy is fun and gr8!
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Aug 10, 2019 02:15
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I hated those tests where you had to fill out an entire page of equations in like, a minute. In my class it was called 'math crackerjack' because you got a box of crackerjacks when you reached a certain amount of correct answers. Like I'm talking insane amounts of dread if the test came up. I always struggled with math, so I studied a field that didn't involve much math. When I got to writing my dissertation stats weren't a requirement of class completion so I never took stats. Teaching myself stats was the most grueling, frustrating poo poo (and my entire committee ducked me with 'oh I'm no good at stats'. When it finally clicked (reading through an example about paint thickness) I felt like the biggest brain genius.
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Aug 10, 2019 02:37
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A Mathematician's Lamentquote:A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.
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Aug 10, 2019 02:41
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We did addition and subtraction on our fingers in primary. My education was sane
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Aug 10, 2019 02:45
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Somehow I went on to study math in college and got a degree in it. I would compare the way math is taught in elementary and even into college, to studying literature by decomposing books into their grammatical structures and memorizing them. It is absurd. Most teachers don't know math themselves. I think it is sad that the vast majority of Americans students never really get exposed to real math. My nephew is struggling in school but is otherwise pretty smart. We go through a book on algebra which teaches the subject from the construction of the integers using prose and elementary proofs. It's fun watching him actually understand what's really going on, when to use diagrams, experimenting with problem solving strategies. Kurt Loadeater fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Aug 10, 2019 |
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Aug 10, 2019 02:54
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Kurt Loadeater posted:Most teachers don't know math themselves. This is, in my experience, problem A number 1 with a bullet point.
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Aug 10, 2019 03:02
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The quadratic equation is forever burned into my brain because we learned it to the tune of Pop Goes The Weasel, our nearly-retired teacher gleefully conducting class singalongs with his pencils. X is equal to negative B Plus or minus the square root Of B squared minus 4AC All over 2A
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Aug 10, 2019 03:52
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Sin Opposite Hypotenuse Cos Adjacent Hypotenuse Tan Opposite Adjacent I remember this and I remember which sides of the triangle they are but don't remember what any of it means.
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Aug 10, 2019 05:12
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It's a mnemoic to know which trig ratio you can use to solve a certain kind of problem. Namely, if you have a right triangle, and you know only one side, but you also know the angles, that mnemonic helps you know how to find the other sides.
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Aug 10, 2019 05:21
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I legit want to re-learn math because holy gently caress am I bad at it as an adult. Should I just show up to 7th grade math class???
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Aug 10, 2019 06:48
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I loved these games so much! My math teacher in high school was my Mum which was as horribly embarrassing as you can imagine and is probably the reason why I didn't like math until a decade later where now it's my favourite subject at uni. Beartaco fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Aug 10, 2019 |
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Aug 10, 2019 07:10
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 19:43 |
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i can only count by dividing my crazy bones collection into small piles but i dont really need too anymore cuz i work making magazine collages at the centre
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Aug 10, 2019 07:18
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