Survey posted 2006-03-03 04:12 by Jon.

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Calculus 2 hates me. It hates me so much that it failed me the first time around. Don't worry, it's mutual. It's not a prerequisite for anything but the piece of paper...

ah... sarcasm. (senior @ the university of south florida, EE).

maybe I had good calculus teachers or something but I found calc 2 to be ridiculously easy.

Or perhaps you had a good calculator... Anyways that happens to me too (except I'm only in Algebra 2). I always seem to be the only one to understand things perfectly, so I stop listening in class. Instead I read the whole chapter at home. take notes, then make programs for those chapters. Those programs seem to be so precious to the rest of the class...

>>Or perhaps you had a good calculator...

Oh, I have an 83+ and an 89Ti... Don't help me though because we're not allowed to use them. Welcome to the real world.

We can't use calcs., either. THey do, however, let us use slide rules.

Seriously? Has anyone tried bringing one in?

I do all the time.

I shall have to remember to ask that next time they say we cannot use calculators. My high school physics teacher gave me a slide rule for graduation.

The real world? more like the 80's. I don't see why we can't use them in school (I do) when in the 'real world' we have a little thing called "technology" apparently some adults think that we should have to be tought the same way as them. They are wrong. It's stupid to throw away modern brilliance all for the purpose of education (if that makes sense, i dont think it does, but you get the point)

It's actually not a bad idea to ban calculators. My professor just makes the problems easy enough that you don't need to do massive amounts of algebra.

Anyways, calculators only take you so far: eventually you hit the abstract stuff and you're screwed.

I agree with you, but calculators do make some work many times easier. For example, 3^23 * 7^9 would take a wee bit of time without calculators.

That is until you turn on a calculator and see the calculations 34+58, or 3*20.

No it is not. To learn something you have to practice it. If the only way you can solve a problem is with a calculator, then you don't understand the problem (regarding the "3^23 * 7^9"; you don't *want* to perform the full calculation by hand, but you know how you'd do it if you had to).
In dutch high schools (for 'translation' purposes, that is where students are usually 12 to 18 years old), we started using graphing calcs about 7 or 8 years ago. Students also got a booklet with formula (so they didn't have to memorize all of them). It has now become painfully clear that the graduates from that new systems (even the ones wanting to study Applied Mathematics, Computer Sciences, Physics or Electrical Engineering!) don't know enough math for their university courses; they have to use a bloody calc for everything. Sure, they get answers if you allow them to use a calc, but without a calc they're helpless. They lack insight in what they're doing (they'll write down answers with are many others of magnitude of, instead of instinctively knowing something went wrong.
Believe me, if you want to be good at math, you'll have to practice a lot. Except for some statistical stuff and regression formulas, you should be able to do anything a TI83 can do by hand. Once you trully understand it I couldn't care less if you want to use a calc (or Mathematica for that matter), but first you have to understand and master it yourself. For if you don't know how to do 83-level stuff by hand (say, for instance, rref-ing a matrix), you'll be way out of your leagua when you get to Mathematica/MatLab/Maple-level maths (rref-ing a matrix where each element is a complex, rational polynomial for instance).

I couldn't use one. I think that in colledge they don't like calcs as much as highschool teachers do

AAbsolutely. In H.S. we could use calculatora almost the whole time. Our calc tests did have a small no-calculators sectrion. But in college (at U of Minnesota Twin Cities) no calculators (aside from a basic scientific [no graphing]) were allowed on tests, and NO calculators were allowed on the final. Welcome to the "real world." Of course, the "real world" you'll never have to do all that math by hand (at least not us biology majors).

Math isn't my primary focus, but since I am in the end of my second year for Mechanical Engineering, Math is a must. So far, Calc 1, Calc 2, Calc 3 and Linear Algebra (not as easy as it sounds). Next comes Differential Equations and possibly Discrete Math. So, by the time I am done, I will only need two math credits to qualify for a minor in math, which I may or may not do. It isn't that I love math, it usually just comes easy to me.

Yea, MEs do exist here!
Yes, Math certainly is required for ME degree, my college requires Calc 1,2,3, Multivariable(just finished, yea!), DiffEq, Matrices and BVP, and Engineering Stats, which will probably be the easiest of them all. So I dont know where this would fall on the survey, I'll figure it out and vote.

Yay! More ME's!
I am really only interested in math as it applies to science and engineering. I don't care about a lot of the abstract stuff that has no practical use.

I'm actually taking Differential Equations right now (yeah, I'm a high school senior with nothing better to do than to take advanced math courses at community colleges...). It's is a pretty good class; the hardest part is that there are sooo many forms of differential equations to memorize, each with a different solution method. DiffEq is imminently applicable to physics, though....

Yeah, I hate differential equations...I understood calculus and the basic linear equations, but once the book I was using got into Fourier series, I just couldn't get a good grasp of it anymore.

my physics professor seems to end up with differential equations that he just tells us how to solve cause the corequisite is calc 1

Why don't you program them into an 89 like people in the real world do? I don't get why people get angry at people using programs in math. If I made it, then obviously I understand the math. You are almost certainly going to see physicists using some sort of computer software for their experiments. Everyone does programming nowadays. If you can learn it well enough that you can make a program to use it, then you should be allowed to use that program like people in the real world do.

The problem is that most of those 'people' are teachers, and they don't feel that its right for kids with a special skill should be able to use that on tests (the special skill being programing lol)

anyways, those 'people' also have to worry about the distribution of programs, as non-programming kids might use those programs without ever learning the subject, and won't learn the subject

there was a large discussion on this topic in the last survey i think, so u might want to check ti file archives for more...

Teachers think that students shouldnt be able to use special skills that other kids dont have, but what if there was a kid who just loved math and studied it outside of school, and learned advaced concepts that wernt taught in the class, would this not qualify as a special skill? any kid can go out and learn computer programming, i had an advantage in geometry when we were doing conditionals, being a computer programmer, i had special skills in my discovering programming concepts class, because i had done programming fo so long. people use special skills all the time. so what if you can program? y not use it to your advantage?

That's what's wrong with public school. Everyone's forced into the same standards, no matter if they know more or less or learn differently or whatever.

i totally agree w/ you, im a freshman in highschool and taking geometry, i always make programs to help me w/ certain things, like cordinate geometry and stuff, but i make them all as functions on the v200, and im the only kid in my math class with a v200, so i cant give them to anyone, but i could always make them for the 83+, there was this one time in 7th grade where me and one of my friends were trying to see who could create the best math program for Math C, we came up with some pretty cool programs, but they all got lost over the years through unexpected ram clears and crashes. but programming is a great tool for math, and math is a great tool for programming, i can honestly say that doing programming has given me great advanteges in math and vice versa. Besides, its always nice to be able to make games in math class when you are bored. Tons of people think computer programmers are nerds and dont realize that without them, society would be nowhere

>Tons of people think computer programmers are nerds and dont realize that without them, society would be nowhere

Yeah, the people that tease people because they program or think they're strange probably couldn't live without their computer games...or reliable power...or a good phone system...or plenty of the other things that wouldn't be possible without programmers.

Yeah, in other words, without us programmers, the world as we know it wouldn't exist!

Without us programmers, the world would be stuck in the 1950s. See link---it's a wonderful museum; if you're in the area you should go.

whats all this crap about the "REAL WORLD?"
It's not just you, something. It's everyone. ENOUGH WITH THE REAL WORLD CRAP!

In the "REAL WORLD" adults think it's still the age before technolgy. The fake moonlanding easn't yesterday. In the 80's illusion world where there aren't any calculators, people are idiots

*wasn't yesterday*

You don't have to understand the math to make a program for it. Trust me, I know :]

Well, then, what's the point of making the program. If you haven't learned the math, then you're just cheating yourself by using the program. On the other hand, figuring out how to do a certain math operation within a program can help you figure out how to do it by hand...

How hard is Linear Algebra? I'm assuming it's about lines and linear equations, so how hard can it be?

Well, in theory, it's not so hard. The primary focus of Linear Algebra (which, by the way, I've not taken) is solving systems of linear equations through the use of matrices. The hard part is when you get very large systems of equations and have to solve them by hand. I think it's tedious more than anything.

busy work-america's pass time

Correct. It isn't all that hard, it is just solving systems of equations using matrices (and other methods). However, it is extremely tedious and at times, can be a bit tricky (with lots of equations and extra variable...Iegan Values anyone???). It is just that when I tell people I am in Linear Algebra (which is actually called Elementary Linear Algebra at my University), they look at me with a funny face since I am in Calc 3 and Linear Algebra. They think it is something I should have taken back in 8th grade but that isn't true at all.