Every other degree exists to give you a basic grounding of all principles involved. And its a shame because they form the foundation for advanced fields such as engineering and physics.įor people wanting to go into careers that require that kind of stuff, they should take those classes or pick it up during an internship. Basic trig and algebra are what usually scare kids away from math because of stupid shit like that. Or that sine is opposite over hypotenuse and not adjacent over hyp. Its easy to bomb a test because you forgot its -b +- and not b +- or b^2-4ac and not b^2 + 4ac in the quadratic formula.
More kids would benefit if teachers stopped with the bull shit rote learning of formulas and instead taught the kids how to use them. Someone may think "hey, that's cheating!" But think about it for a moment, how is jotting down formulas and some notes on how to apply them cheating? If you don't understand the material how do you know which notes to make or how to apply the formulas? You wouldn't. And I came out with an excellent understanding of the material. And he was absolutely right because that was the first math class that I received an A+ 96%+ on every exam. He stated that its more important for us to understand the steps to solving a problem rather than memorizing a formula that can be easily looked up. The best math professor I had in college let us take a page of notes to an exam. Of course, I already have one of the Casio CG-10 calculators.
Require students to have a specific level of calculator for each grade? I'm sure that would go over really well with parents. Having said that, I'm not sure how some elementary school teacher is supposed to teach fractions when even fairly basic calculators can handle fractions these days (some even displaying the result as you'd write it on paper). Even then, things like word problems require them to identify the right formula and set it up properly (which is more important than actually being able to grind out the numerical answer from there). it isn't hard for a good teacher (or textbook) to ask questions that actually test the student and not the calculator - at least, unless they have one of those algebraic calculators. At the university I taught at, we actually required students to have a graphing calculator for certain classes.Īt the college level. I was teaching when the original TI-83 came out - the earlier 81 and 85 came out while I was in college. Its more or less the college prep kids equivalent of when the shop kids make bongs in class instead of birdfeeders. So this is what kids do with their "valuable educational math tools" instead of whatever curriculum the PR firm releases. I learned calc in my senior year of HS anyway, but it was much more despite having a graphing calc than because I had a graphing calc. Its quite slow on a TI-81 but watchable and interesting from a demo-scene perspective. Without double (triple?) buffering the flashing as it redraws is almost unbearable and you have to have a strategy to depend with floating point rounding (like not rotating the existing cube by 1 degree each time, you rotate a unit cube by a continuously varying angle (like 41 degrees X rotation this time, 42 the next etc). Basically you store the 3-d cube as an array of the corners coordinates and then plot them ignoring the Z coord, then execute a transform on all the points (there are several ways to implement this), replot, run the transform, replot, you end up with a little controllable rotating cube. Also in high school I did learn a fair amount of trig on my own as I finally got a working 3d cube render-er which was a pretty stereotypical 80s home computer BASIC challenge. My microcontroller instuctor was somewhat impressed. Welcome to state machines! The '48 had pretty good hex math capabilities and I never implemented the whole instruction set, but I certainly had the basic load, store, add, branch type stuff and a crude debugger UI that could show contents of registers and memory and single step etc.
Unfortunately, the algorithms I used on my TI-81 were more like, "crude text adventure parser" (stereotypical DnD dungeon) "parametric equation of a side view of a boob" (boys will be boys) and in later years when I had a HP-48 I wrote a pretty decent 68hc11 simulator using an array as memory and variables as the registers. In order to write a program, you must understand what the algorithm does that you're using. Actually, you know more about calculus than you think you do.