Re: schools banning homework

morrisjcroy@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
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).

Yuck!


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.

The books I borrowed were either science fiction or had something to do with space. I read many of the SF classics, including a lot of Jules Verne.


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. ;-)

When I was younger, I was fascinated by many of the equations that would appear in movies or TV shows. Later, when I had more of a background in math, I realized that many of them were rubbish and were merely used as props.


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.


The closest I came to that was the few days of calculus we covered in Grade 12. Its usefulness wasn't clear until I started university, though it wasn't until after I finished my B. Sc. that it really started making sense for me.
.

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