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Re: [Phys-L] Legitimate Phys-L topics.



On 01/06/2014 10:37 AM, Bill Nettles wrote:
Student: I can't do math.
Me: I can't do sympathy

ROTFL!

I love imagining things like that.

Along the same lines, here's an example from BtVS:

Snyder: “Percy is flunking history. Nothing seems to be able to motivate him.”
Percy: “Hey, I’m challenged.
Snyder: “You’re lazy, self-involved, and spoiled. That’s quite the challenge.”

And then there's always this:
http://www.madmagazine.com/tags/snappy-answers-to-stupid-questions

===================================

The only problem is, such things work better in the
land of imagination than they do in the real world.

I know plenty of people who struggle with math. The
worst case is where there is a genuine lack of skill
*plus* a phobia.
-- Even people with paranoia have real enemies.
-- Even people with phobias have objective reasons
to be afraid.

Consider the case of somebody who is plenty smart but
woefully lacking in pre-algebra skills, and has repeatedly
been put into an algebra class and failed miserably. It
is entirely rational to be afraid of that happening again.
Now if you add an irrational phobia on top of that, you've
got a big mess.

I blame the previous teacher, and the one before that,
and the one before that, going back several years. How
could you not notice that this person wasn't keeping up?
Why didn't you do something?!?!????! This would have
been trivially fixable N years ago, requiring maybe 5
hours of tutoring. It's probably still fixable, but
it's going to take 10 or 20 times more work, and a more
highly skilled tutor.

A major contributing factor is the fact that the students --
and all-too-many of the math teachers -- don't see how math
connects to the real world. If you google for "real-world
algebra" the results are exceedingly disappointing.

In an attempt to perhaps alleviate part of this problem,
I typed up a few notes on what algebra is good for in the
real world.
http://www.av8n.com/physics/algebra-intro.htm
Comments and suggestions are welcome.