The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Achewood => Achewood => Topic started by: Victoria Waterfield on February 10, 2012, 05:21:08 am
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http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=02092012
The striptych grew a few extra tychs, he says.
Also, I'm not sure I understand what's going on.
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That's more maths than I can do.
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So the nonsense about "count to twelve" is Ray's subconscious reference to 12 step programs?
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My hovercraft is full of eels.
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I remember when I realized I could do math. It was surprisingly late in life. I had been doing math my whole life, but from a mindset that I couldn't do math. I had just finished clearly explaining compound interest to a guy who called the call centre for Mastercard that I worked at and I got off the phone and realized "hey wait, I understand math!" It was a pretty rad moment. I wanted to call my grade ten math teacher Mr. Lindall and tell him to go fuck himself, and felt pretty triumphant about my new confidence the whole day.
Also, we have a tool that looks similar to the thing about to grab Ray's eye ball. It is meant for picking up bolts and such that have fallen into places hands can't reach. Grandma also had a some what similar thing that was supposed to be a "pickle picker" the benefit I guess being that unlike a fork, you don't end up piercing the pickle. I guess I'm not too caught up in food aesthetics because I don't give a flying fuck if my pickle has been pierced prior to eating it. Both the bolt picker upper and the pickle picker seemed like silly uni-task tools to me, what with magnets and forks ready to do the job and many others... It's mostly when I'm in the kitchen or at a kitchen-based store, but sometimes Alton Brown's voice chants "uni-tasker! Uni-tasker! Unitasker!" in my head. It's a thing.
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I sure as fuck can't do higher math.
I can do simple math in my head faster than most people, I think, but you get past... oh... intermediate algebra or something and I am fuckin' ignorant as hell.
Does this... make me a lady?
Have I been confused all these years?
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I'm the opposite, LFM. I have problems with basic arithmetic. I can wrap my head around some level of more complex stuff, in theory, but not being strong in my basic math facts held me back, so I never got past what my college called "Functions and Graphs" (and I only got that far because I was forced to take a math credit). I am awesome at spatial relations and geometry, though -- as long as I can use a calculator and deal mainly with shapes and lines instead of numbers, I do fine. And I can still balance chemical equations, even though it's been (holy hell) almost twenty years since I've needed to, because I can visualize the molecules moving around. But calculus and physics are just...woof. Way beyond me.
I think I might actually have mild dyscalculia. I have trouble with certain numbers, mainly 7s and 9s but also occasionally 3s and 5s (insert Monty Python joke here). I just plain misread them. And I have never been able to remember strings of numbers -- even short, 4 - 6 digit strings, even for only a few seconds. If I have to look up a phone number, I can't remember it long enough to dial it -- I have to write it down or I will transpose numbers. I can only remember my PIN for my debit card by the pattern it makes on the number pad; if the configuration is different (i.e, a telephone-style layout) I am sunk. And I cannot add two double-digit numbers in my head, unless one of them is "10." Multiplication is right out.
My brother is a math teacher, he can multiply three-digit numbers in his head and figure odds and percentages on the fly in seconds. But he hates to read, he is a slow reader and he despises writing even more. The family joke was that he took all the math genes in the family and didn't leave any for me. It's odd how different our learning styles are. But the older I get the more I think that maybe my problems with math go beyond "I'm just not good at it" and are verging on "undiagnosed learning disability" territory.
It's something I've considered being tested for, actually, along with possibly having myself evaluated for adult Asperger's (or, I guess, as of the DSM-V, autism spectrum disorder). But I don't know if, at this point in my life, it would make any difference or do any good. (I welcome y'all's opinions on the topic, though).
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One of my friends has a son with Aspergers and had herself and her hubby evaluated to normalize it for her son. She found out she falls somewhere on the autism spectrum which her son often mentions. It seems to empower him in some way. She thinks everyone has autism though, which is a little annoying at times.
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I chalk my difficulty with higher math up with my inability to learn a foreign language under the same blame as my mind being over committed to the English language, the fact that I was reading very early, that I can speed read and type around secretarial speed and so forth.
This might be bullshit but it was always my internal explanation.
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I got really high scores on standardized tests of math, but can't actually do math to save my life. I never went beyond "pre-calculus." Lately I think I kind of miss math.
I was AWESOME at physics, though. My teacher wrote a note home complaining that I had a "zero" homework score, despite the fact that my average in the class was a 104 for the first 3 quarters. He had a weird system where homework was not mandatory, but if you did it you got bonus points on your tests. I didn't need the bonus points, so why do the dang homework?
...and then the last quarter I screwed up really badly on one test, and consequently got a B-. Since I didn't do any of the homework. WELL.
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i took calculus and immediately forgot everything math-related that i already knew.
i've since forgotten what little of calculus i'd learned.
luckily, programming doesn't give a shit about math!
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If a number can't come real / Then I don't need that stumper
The concept of the variable / Can take it in the dumper
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If a number can't come real / Then I don't need that stumper
The concept of the variable / Can take it in the dumper
amen, brah.
math is my academic weakness. i didnt actually know my times tables until i was in 6th grade.
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I am terrible at math, and it happened because I was too resourceful for my own good. They were thinking of skipping me over third grade, so they gave me extra work to do in math and I guess some other subjects and I did it well enough that they skipped me over the grade. Unfortunately what they didn't realize was that I was doing the multiplication problems by addition - like when asked what was three times six, I added up six three times. So I spent the rest of my school career lost in math classes, unable to keep up because I didn't have my multiplication tables memorized.
There is an important lesson here about how there are situations where it is NOT a good idea to apply creativity instead of memorization.
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I was good enough at math to pass tests without doing homework until pre-calculus when the layering of basic math skills slowed me to a crawl. Then it was absolute torture, as I knew how to do the problem, but crawling step by step through the problem took forever and I hadn't developed the self-discipline to keep on task (my parents had to apply external motivation in the form of grounding, withdrawls of TV, telephone, computer, etc). Then when it came time for college and I was determined to be a Scientist, I discovered that the pre-requsite for Biology was Chemistry, and the pre-requisite for Chemistry was high math proficiency. I spent a summer teaching myself logarithms and retaking pre-calc in a Junior College, then banged through Calc I through III over the next year in a fit of "damn I can do this if I want to!"
Calculus, or at least the degree to which I pursued it, ended up being a waste of time. I should have taken biostatistics like the rest of the biologists. I had to teach myself statistics once I started working in the field.
Wombat's observation about the misapplication of creativity over memorization in some situations is right on. One thing I learned over all this is that it isn't enough to know how to do a particular math process - you also have to drill it over, and over, and over to get the process to work efficiently so it can serve as a strong foundation for the next set of principles.
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My formal education was shit so math and all its attendant pals (calculus, physics etc) were always scary and humiliating to me.
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I basically never learned my multiplication tables. Many extremely frustrating months of my life with flash cards did not help this. Yelling did not help this. Snarky teachers did not help this. It is just not how my brain works. The only way I know them know is by having to USE that information. Being quizzed and flash-carded has never taught me anything.
For some reason people are REALLY impressed when I can divide their total by two, in order to split it onto multiple credit cards. I can't decide if this is because they expect me to be stupid, or because people are really that bad at math.
Although, the other day I told a couple that they each owed $42.50.23. Should have said $42.73 but my mental math mechanism short-circuited.
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Although, the other day I told a couple that they each owed $42.50.23.
Funny, that makes perfect sense to me in terms of making change out of a cash register.
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Did you want an AMEN to that? Because you got one from over here in the corner.
The annoying part is that could I go back in time to 9 year old me and have that conversation, he still wouldn't be impressed. My idea of what a scientist was at the time was firmly rooted in the mid 1800s with "natural philosophers", dinosaur hunters, and conservationists (the kind that conserved wildlife by shooting them and putting their skins in natural history museums. I didn't see where math entered into it.
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I was always hella good at math, doing it all in my head (and writing it down for the teacher if that's what they wanted) until I got to calculus. Then I completely lost my shit and wandered out with a D. No more maths, please.
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I was always hella good at math, doing it all in my head (and writing it down for the teacher if that's what they wanted) until I got to calculus. Then I completely lost my shit and wandered out with a D. No more maths, please.
Yep, that's me. Algebra? No problem. Geometry? Tore it up. Trig? Bring it on.
fuck*ng chain rule? Buuuhhhhhhhdawwwwp.
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My bestfriend and I were in the same grade 12 math class with a teacher who was a total asshole, Mr. Lindall. He would outright call students losers and stupid if they had any issues and if you dared ask a question he would laugh at you, make fun of you and otherwise humiliate you. I had him in grade 10, a different teacher in grade 11, and him again in grade 12. My grades went: low C, A, low C. My best friend and I commiserated with each other a lot over how awful our teacher was. For finals I made her a commemorative T-shirt that read "It's Over! I survived Mr. Lindall's Grade Twelve Math!" She wore it to the exam, and when the teacher asked where she got it, she said "they're selling them outside the door." She and I are still friends to this day. She's a teacher now.
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My bestfriend and I were in the same grade 12 math class with a teacher who was a total asshole, Mr. Lindall. He would outright call students losers and stupid if they had any issues and if you dared ask a question he would laugh at you, make fun of you and otherwise humiliate you. I had him in grade 10, a different teacher in grade 11, and him again in grade 12. My grades went: low C, A, low C. My best friend and I comiserated with each other a lot over how awful our teacher was. For finals I made her a comemorative T-shirt that read "It's Over! I survived Mr. Lindall's Grade Twelve Math!" She wore it to the exam, and when the teacher asked where she got it, she said "they're selling them outside the door." She and I are still friends to this day. She's a teacher now.
I love this. But you really should have made two dozen and sold them on the way out after the exam. You'd have made a killing.
We had a physics teacher (by we, I mean me, Pedro, and my BFF) who was just a dick to people. He would brag about how many times he had made girls cry by grilling them with hard questions in front of the class. Basically a big grown-up bully.
He was a big fat round guy who looked a lot like the guy who played Newman on Seinfeld (but our teacher was much larger) and also vaguely like the guy in this Old El Paso Commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiEk1zew0UE) around the time we were in his class. So we would alternately call him "Newman" or "Nacho Man" behind his back when he was being evil.
I had him second period and BFF and Pedro had him fifth, and one day he caught wind of our relationship and casually mentioned to Pedro during class that "blondes are a dime a dozen anyway," basically implying (based on the context that was relayed to me secondhand) that I was essentially a throwaway whore. Pedro, the charming, mild-mannered, model student and student government representative, shot back with, "Fuck off, Nacho Man" before he could blink. He ended up getting written up for detention for the first and only time in his life, but NM offered to let him out of it if he came back the next day with an apology and a candy bar. Which, of course, he did. Last I heard he is still teaching. What a smug sonofabitch he was.
The other thing I remember was that he had a pair of pale blue trousers that he would sometimes wear with a pale pink dress shirt and yellow tie. On those days, he was neither Newman nor Nacho Man. On those days, he was an Easter Egg.