Who here watched vihart and agrees with her views on math teaching?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmhl2W-kuBc
>gender was a stupid concept to me until basket cases at university started yelling at me
Silly females and their personality cults.
>>7679752
>Understanding the concept, before actually solving equations
quite difficult to teach
>>7679782
Can't tell if sarcasm because teaching concepts is pretty hard to a newcomer.
Instead we teach how to solve equations because it's easier to teach
>>7679752
She has no views. She's a special snowflake mathematical semi-autistic hipster that only engages in meme pop-math topics like fractals and limits/infinity and has probably never proved a single substantial result in her life.
>Hart is the child of mathematical sculptor George W. Hart, and was educated at Stony Brook University.[2] As well as producing mathematical videos, Hart has co-authored several research papers on computational geometry and the mathematics of paper folding.[5]
What are her fucking degrees though?
>Understanding the concept, before actually solving equations
That's...kinda what is done. You get a concept, the professor gives you an example problem that utilizes previously learned concepts plus this new concept, then solves it. You get similar problems to solve on the homework and exams.
People bitch constantly about the way math and physics are taught. "They don't teach us the concepts!" No, actually, they do. You're just fussing, as people are prone to do when they are actually learning something.
>>7679855
This is great in theory but in practice, if you want to give a lecture on the fundamental theorem of Calculus, they give you the concept and then the general formula. But at the end of the day there will be some who don't understand the concept but because a formula was given, they can just use that without ever having to understand the concept. It boils down to you programming a student to do a set of problems.
I guess you could argue that's what sets apart the good students from the average ones but that defeats the purpose of education.
>>7679855
The problem starts in late grade school when improperly taught order of operations begins to return "incorrect" results that learner feels to be entirely correct within the established framework (which appears coherent).
This then makes it "my answer is right, and yours is wrong. Because." It is the core problem that most math failures stem from.
>>7679817
>meme pop-math
Math is a may-may now
I dont think i would be a good calculus student if i fully understood the philosophy without knowing how to solve a chapter 1 problem.
This is why its ongoing learning and understanding.
For example, i was taught by my professor what the riemann sum is before the first or second fundemental rules of calculus. Why? So i understand the underlying principals before i just learn to number crunch. That way, im not just a poorly programmed walking calculator going into calc 2 and on.
>>7679774
Utada is bae
>>7679969
Oh how the fuck did I even do that?
I swear I was looking it up for a friend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmKix-75dsg
>parabolas are an artificial construct and have no practical applications
lol k
>>7679960
This. I had very unenthusiastic math teachers through middle and high school, who focused almost completely on number crunching and getting ready for the exact problems that were going to be on the next scantron.
>>7679752
Hart identifies as gender agnostic, not as a woman.[9]
>>7679967
Part of the issue is how much beating around the bush students have to do to get that WELL ROUNDED education!
You could really get them to shred into a topic, if they were able to actually study that topic on its own. But nah, we gotta do that, plus a foreign language, plus an inflated as fuck chem class(never had something that could be so straightforward and yet demand an ungodly amount of consistent attention.)
I'd basically do it like so.
>One class a day, one subject a day, for as long as you need and as many classes per week as you need to keep them moving at an appropriate pace.
>All of the bullshit gets lumped into the end of the week. Charge them the same amount, if you want.
>no one required to take chem when they are already taking physics
>>7679985
>You can't know that it's not a trap!
>>7679972
This video makes me feel quite ambivalent.
She's documenting her evolution from a shitty, utterly obnoxious and myopic human being... to something that still has wanting conclusions. Gender is a high level cultural illusion. People who struggle with it are really having a struggle with cultural identity, and it stems from a deficit in their underlying philosophies.
They're searching for reconciliation of their role within their creator. Their environment. Unfortunately, better, more useful, more meaningful answers could probably be found within. I went through a phase similar to this when I was younger, only I rejected the body entirely. Tried to strip away culture outright and become a pure representation of the self, a fluid concept. No sex. No "gender". No name. No me, and yet, entirely me. Ultimately I had to learn this me was no more me than any of the others, and it introduced a lot of issues as well.
The internet sucks. If people couldn't find these feedback loops, and if "trans" wasn't "the thing" right now, people might be spurred to try other things instead of latching to a sense of group identity. Self identity is easily made a subset of the group.
>>7679996
"It's delusion," is the skinny of it. A preacher suggests to someone that they "feel the holy spirit's presence" and sure enough, they faint like the gullible fucks they are.
A shitty website suggests to a teenager, who wants individuality, that they have a super special and unfalsifiable mental disease that they can have a persecution complex over, and they take that without a grain of salt in the same way.
The important thing is that this cult doesn't become something that is protected from criticism.
>>7679990
I agree that curriculum is overly inflatted with subjects that do not pertain to your degree path in most degrees paths, including shit tier degrees.
But you should take at least chem 2 minimum for a physics degree or engineering degree.
>>7680032
>But you should take at least chem 2 minimum for a physics degree or engineering degree.
Fucking WHY?
I'm wrapping up Chem I. This shit is trivial and just reaffirms things that I learned in physics in simplified ways. Sure, there's a bit of fun to it. I enjoy the class, but I don't enjoy how much focus I am being made to put on trivia that I will never fucking need while I have shit that's actually difficult that I should be focusing on.
I'm comp sci, for god's sake. What the fuck even?
>>7680032
>>7679990
>Well rounded
The world is moving too fast for a well rounded education now. This whole idea of writing a paper and taking rhetoric classes for an engineering degree is obsolete. Instead this sort of writing should be implemented with respect to the degree path. Sure that means you're no longer learning about Nietzsche, Claude Levi Strauss or Grim Brothers but at least you'd be able to do your fucking job. If you wanna be able to communicate with everyone you need to learn that shit on your own. Education alone can't teach you every academic thing you need to know in life.
>>7680032
Chemistry is just applied physics. There's no need for chemistry because you apply all of it in higher level classes
>>7679972
I don't understand how anyone that practices mathematics could have trouble understanding the notion.
Gender just refers to the cultural identity while sex refers to the physical state. Gender is a social construct in the sense that it only "exists" as a social concept between human beings. In some human cultures they have multiple genders that play different roles in society.
It's not impossible to actually be gender agnostic in the sense that an individual may just as easily partake in one gender identity culture as they do in another.
>>7679752
>with her views
if you're talking about the "math class is boring" thing
that's not a view, it's a hook
>>7680246
>gender is social construct
And that's where the trouble all beings. I don't think gender is a social construct. If it were, I'd agree but it isn't. There's no difference between gender and biological sex, they're two words to describe the same thing.
>>7680354
all begins*
>>7680354
The thing is that gender depends on the culture. For instance there are some eastern cultures with as many as five different genders. Each gender dresses in a certain way, has certain cultural behaviors, certain mannerisms, sexual roles, and societal roles.
Suppose you started a colony of clone humans on another planet. You could give them an altered history and artifical culture to direct the ways they act and dress in accordance to their roles in society.
>>7680039
So you know how chemicals interract, understand intermolecular forces, understand why you're using certain materials, understand gases, liquids, solids, etc.
What if Fermi had said fuck chemistry and then never created Chicago pile-1??
>>7680043
Thats what i am expressing. We dont need 160 credits to get a mechanical engineering degree, its mandated. But if you are in a degree path like physics, you should have to take some chemistry classes so you have a background in it. Same for engineering.
>>7680246
You really expect someone to believe that someone who identifies as a man, but is biologically a woman can understand this notion of gender?
The whole idea is confusing. In mathematics we don't use systems where 4 identifies as an odd number but has the properties of an even number except for maybe proofs. And I doubt there's more than a handful of proofs that require such an identity. Everything is set and controlled in mathematics. Whereas gender is not defined at all because you have a group of people that say a woman is defined by social actions and another group saying gender is defined by biological sex.
>>7679960
>order of operations
indeed. They should teach postfix- or prefix operations instead of the unholy historical artifact of infix and the associated precedence artifacts.
>>7680246
Math teaches logic.
Making up fancy new problems because "muh special snowflake" is illogical. Our world and our species has more important things to worry about than teen angst/attention seeking.
>>7681360
>>7681377
In mathematics you abstract and generalize concepts.
A foolish non-mathy person will encounter geometry and assume that it's all the same (A countably infinite euclidean metric space, etc..). A mathy person however will start abstracting out the properties and in the process will develop the notion of synthetic geometry where suddenly one is able to talk about many more general types of geometries, even crazy finite ones that behave entirely differently from the Euclidean geometry.
In this same way a non-mathy person will see sex and assume that gender is always the same thing. However a mathy person is able to abstract out the two properties in order to be able to talk about all sorts of different human societies.
The idea is that sex is just the biological characteristic. There's nothing inherent about sex that says one should wear makeup, wear dresses, dress in pink/blue, play with dolls, play with trucks, be a homemaker, work hard labor, have short/long hair, etc.. These are all part of our (western) cultural identity. There exist and have existed human civilizations where there are extra genders that are neither masculine nor feminine and have their own identity (clothing, behavior, etc..).
Eg. back in the day (in western society) women always wore traditional female clothing, dresses, skirts, blouses, etc.. and there was some level of repression towards women who did not abide by this. Over the years though this has more or less disappeared because it doesn't actually fucking matter if women wear pants and dress like tomboys. This is because the female gender boundaries have changed. However this does not mean that the female sex has changed at all. Again, gender = culture; sex = biological.
If all of this still doesn't convince you that this abstraction is a good thing then consider that by separating gender from sex you can ask people stuff about their sex without having to worry about any of their weird gender beliefs.
>>7681831
>uncountably infinite
fixed
>>7679855
Fuck...I go to that University...
>>7679967
My algebra teacher turned me into a poorly programmed walking calculator.
I couldn't tell you what I was doing, I could just do it.
It's so unfair and bullshit.
