ChapterZero

I finally signed up for a K5 account– since I’ve been a big fan of the site for so long, I figured its about time I contributed something. So I’m trying to think of something worth writing about. At least, for K5; anything else, whether worthy or not, will find its way to this site.

I had an interesting day today: first I had my ECE class, where my usually uninspiring and uninspired professor produced a rather novel method to introduce functions to the class. It involved lined people up against walls on opposite sides of the room ( representative of variables in a function and those in its caller ) and having them move across the room in opposite directions to attach to each other (simulating the binding of actual to formal parameters), with the two directions signifying input and output. Maybe he’s not such a failure after all– that’s a rather ingenious teaching aid. And by positing the idea of people frozen indefinitely in the receptive position, he illustrated how functions are useful as devices to preserve and reuse logic.

After that, I had a funny calculus test. I still can’t quite figure out why it was funny, but still, everytime I think of it, I start smirking. Maybe part of it is I never really study for cal tests, just cause math is one of those things, like computer related areas, that I either get immediately and it sticks in my head, or I don’t get, but when I do get it, sticks in my head. Anyway, I actually tried to study for this test– probably just because I was working on a paper all last night and before school, so I felt kind of guilty for not even having cracked the cal book, i.e. out of my insidious tendency to torture myself. So, we went into the test– only 4 problems, mind you– and it still took me the entire hour to do. The first two problems were a cake walk, just applications of definitions really; but the last two problems were a little more involving. The forth problem had me panicking for a while– it was a proof, and I was sweating until I was hit by the epiphany. The third problem was the only one I couldn’t complete, and the humor of the test resides within that factoid: for some stupid reason, whoever wrote the test assumed that we remembered how to integrate square roots of polynomials from cal II. Hello! we are in cal III; all that stuff is way behind us. Come to think of it, I think the TAs wrote up the test– they’re of the overzealous, complete-focus-of-their-world-is-their major, type– not that they’re bad people, they’re actually endearing in their mad scientist way, but really! I think it was just an absent-minded mistake because I’m taking the same prof for cal III as cal II, and in cal II, he never required us to memorize the formulas. Since we’re in cal III, I can’t see him expecting us to remember formulas from cal II that we didn’t even have to remember the first time around.
Somehow, the humor’s dissipated now…

And after that I had a HS discussion, nothing special there really. Then I enjoyed talking to a smart, and smart-alecky, friend of mine for a while. And now I’m blogging until either guilt pulls me away from the keyboard to do something more practical, I think of something more attractive, or I run out of ideas.

Possibly relevant posts:

• UH’s second annual middle and high school math competition (2/20/2006)
• Today’s Tests (2/22/2003)
• Convergence (2/7/2005)