Re: schools banning homework

It's a good thing that I largely gave up reading popular fiction.

I remember when "The Thorn Birds" was published in the late 1970s. I
recall that every second or third person on the bus was reading a copy. I,
instead, would have my nose in a copy of "Science", "Scientific American",
or "Analog" (back in the days when it was still published by Conde Nast).

What would be amusing is 300 or 400 years from now, crap like "The Da
Vinci Code" or John Grisham becomes the equivalent of "classic"
literature (like Shakespeare is today).

I don't read much fiction at all these days. When I was younger, most
of the books I signed out from the library were mostly non-fiction.
The only fiction books I ever read in those days, were the ones
assigned in English class.

When I was in a freshman in high school (grade 9) during the first
month of classes, on impulse I signed out a book titled "calculus made
easy" from the school library and attempted to read it and work my way
through it.

http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Made-Easy-Silvanus-Thompson/dp/0312185480

At the time I thought all the symbols on the pages looked cool, as
well as the Greek letters. ;-)

I was able to crank out many derivatives and integrals in a somewhat
"mindless" manner by following the set of formulas and rules, without
really understanding what I was doing. It took me awhile to figure
out that a derivative represented the slope of the tangent to a
curve. (I didn't even know what the slope of a line was at the time,
until I looked up the definition in the math textbook we were assigned
for grade 9 that year). The idea of an integral being the area under
a curve seemed a bit easier to understand, though how exactly it was
connected to the anti-derivative formulas still seemed a bit of a
mystery to me at the time.

A few weeks later I signed out a calculus textbook from the school
library and attempted to work through it. Despite not really
understanding what exactly the subject was all about, I only knew how
to crank out all the easy calculations (ie. the plug-n-chug variety).
I eventually asked my math teacher what a derivative was, and he
explained it in a few minutes. That's when it started to become clear
to me, and how the limit definition of a derivative started to make
sense. He also mentioned all the mindless calculus plug-n-chug
problems I worked out so far, was more than two-thirds of what was
normally covered in the grade 13 calculus course in those days.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Possible Calculus of Variations Problem
    ... of variations has nothing to say about this problem. ... calculus of variations has nothing to do with ... Dini derivatives. ... Shubert's Method, which works for a Lipschitz function on with ...
    (sci.math)
  • Re: Prolems in Mathematics Education
    ... and claim to have taken a calculus course in high ... Then it's a college which says that students don't really need to ... As far as school cirriculum, I would have it consolidated with the ... On the other hand, I have taught mathematics and physics for 29 years, ...
    (sci.math)
  • Re: 4=3 A maths joke
    ... which at least uses some basic calculus? ... the _calculation_ of derivatives. ... About "my hesitation" I, once again, don't have the faintest idea what ... of Leibniz's theorem for differentiation of an integral. ...
    (sci.math)
  • Re: Thomas Covenant series
    ... Bounced off freshman accelerated calculus. ... So I went to see Bob. ... He said he could wipe the mid-term grade from the book ... He was up all night, and an emotional wreck when he got to his oral exam, ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: Parents, kids dont see need for math, science skills
    ... standards and increasing rigor for high school math and science. ... calculus, as a specific example used in the article, ... students interested without boring them more. ...
    (sci.research.careers)