[budda]

congrats jeff!

[TonalArchitect]

Excellent!

That's the way to do it, offer 160 points graded out of 100. My trig & pre-calc teacher did that (33/30).

Also, I know that your considering making the questions more difficult , which is necessary experimentation this early in your career. But of course keep going with the testing on understanding.

Meaning, some teachers are known for ridiculously difficult tests, and they don't seem to understand that adding unnecessary convultion to a problem just adds more steps to screw up and doesn't really add to the understanding of the concept.

But it sounds good, and I'm glad it's working out.

Congtarz!

[JBroll]

Originally Posted by auxioluck

I always wished the teachers would slow the fuck down. There were a lot of times I knew HOW to do equations, but not WHY they were done the way they were.

Yeah, I had to avoid the whole take-this-on-faith business, but since there wasn't a whole lot of material anyway it wasn't too hard to give tons of detail (like actually deriving the quadratic formula, or proving that the square root of 2 is irrational) to show where everything came from.

Jeff

[TonalArchitect]

^ Awesome, that is so helpful.

It's so much better when it's explained, even really simple stuff like the midpoint formula. It makes it so much more tolerable.

[Trespass]

I'm tutoring/part time teaching a 1st year band class, (I don't think my intonation will ever be accurate again) but not only are we ahead of the usual timeframes on theory (basic diatonic intervals ) but I was even able to run a "Schoenburg/Chance" music clinic to further their understanding of the western 12 notes to an octave, had them develop a method to randomize the selection of the 12 notes, and had them score it out and play it.

This really developed their fingering, pushed their scorewriting penmenship, developed their understanding of score itself etc.


But now I have to mark them

[Stealthtastic]

Man, i hate math, currently im getting 53%. Its probably the only subject that i genuinly try at and dont do well at. The rest like science, etc... i get around 78-82 and dont usually bother doing the homework. For me the concepts in math i dont find too difficult to grasp its just that i make stupid little mistakes.

[JBroll]

Everyone makes those little mistakes... unfortunately some people like to pretend otherwise and are as a result generally annoying. It's easy, though, to see it as 'magic' and not as a whole, beautiful picture of everything just making sense - and the second mindset makes it much harder to make mistakes because something that's not quite right 'smells funny' from the minute it's done.

Mental math is simple for me because I see everything I've learned as a little part of the whole and I don't 'section off' some concepts for certain uses - I surprised a lot of students by applying quadratics to mental math (for example, squaring numbers like 6.25 or finding the product of 499 and 501 in under a second using only 'simple' quadratics) and after that things started clicking more often.

What you'll hopefully find, though, is a 'lightbulb' moment where all of a sudden huge things start to come together. If you haven't had one of those moments where everything that went wrong and screwed you up was totally worth it because holyfuckIgetthatnowandthisisclearertooandIKNOWEVER YTHING! then you're missing the best part of the whole thing.

Also, don't confuse doing poorly in school with not knowing things - the only reason I got out of high school was that they were afraid of me and didn't want to deal with me anymore. I didn't do my work, and I skipped class frequently to go read something more interesting on my own... hell, I still haven't broken that habit after a degree and almost two semesters of graduate school...

Jeff

[Jongpil Yun]

Originally Posted by JBroll

Mental math is simple for me because I see everything I've learned as a little part of the whole and I don't 'section off' some concepts for certain uses - I surprised a lot of students by applying quadratics to mental math (for example, squaring numbers like 6.25 or finding the product of 499 and 501 in under a second using only 'simple' quadratics) and after that things started clicking more often.

Let me guess. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman? I seem to remember something about it. I don't know how you do the estimating products thing though. I'm actually really terrible at arithmetic.

[forelander]

Originally Posted by Jongpil Yun

I don't know how you do the estimating products thing though. I'm actually really terrible at arithmetic.

In the example he used, 499 * 501.

let x = 500
499 = x-1
501 = x +1

499 * 501 = (x-1)(x+1) = x²-1 = 500²-1 = 249999

Not the way I'd do it and I'm not terribly fantastic at mental arithmetic either, but that's how you can go about it.

[Jongpil Yun]

Originally Posted by forelander

In the example he used, 499 * 501.

let x = 500
499 = x-1
501 = x +1

499 * 501 = (x-1)(x+1) = x²-1 = 500²-1 = 249999

Not the way I'd do it and I'm not terribly fantastic at mental arithmetic either, but that's how you can go about it.

Cool. Thanks.

[JBroll]

Originally Posted by forelander

In the example he used, 499 * 501.

let x = 500
499 = x-1
501 = x +1

499 * 501 = (x-1)(x+1) = x²-1 = 500²-1 = 249999

Not the way I'd do it and I'm not terribly fantastic at mental arithmetic either, but that's how you can go about it.

That's one way. A big estimate (to get the first part of the number out quickly) and then fine-tuning.

Jeff

[JBroll]

To answer the other one, just use the general square quadratic: (x+y)^2 = x^2+2xy+y^2. Let x=6 and let y=1/4, and the expansion becomes 36 + 2(6)(1/4) + (1/16) = 36 + 3 + .0625 = 39.0625 - a little easier than the obnoxious put-one-number-above-the-other for mental math. Just look for these patterns everywhere and you'll find them.

Jeff

[guitarplayerone]

perfect squares. distribution over three terms. helps later in calculus

[jaxadam]

I love math tricks. I think I have a book somewhere called mathmagic, and it's got some really neat number stuff in there. But I never really liked numbers, I like variables