>> Can you imagine anything more MIND-NUMBINGLY BORING than staring at a
>> sheet of 40 long division problems? YES, I GET IT! I KNOW HOW LONG
>> DIVISION WORKS! STOP BUGGING ME ALREADY! >_<
>>
> Uh, no. The reason you have to do sheet after sheet of utter bullshit
> like that was because your school, like mine, catered to the one idiot
> in the room that didn't grasp the idea after the first 3 times.

That still doesn't make sense. We each got given a textbook. We each 
work through that textbook as quickly or slowly as we please. (Although 
if you're too slow, you get yelled at.) If you get too much stuff wrong, 
they make you redo it, or redo something from a similar textbook.

Which should *still* mean that you only have to do 2,000 questions if 
you're actually that slow at getting it. But noooo...

When math is treated as some kind of punishment, why is anybody 
surprised that nobody wants to do it?

> I refused to do any more of them, they sent me to a school psychologist,
> where they then jumped to several screwed up conclusions, based on, of
> all things, the fact that crayons got handed out alphabetically, so I
> always ended up with the black one (they later adjusted this so people
> got the chance to use other colors, but one wonders how many others
> where misdiagnosed with some sort of disorder over that silly thing),
> and my house **actually** had boxes around the trees and windows, so I
> was "disturbed", because I, "drew boxes around things and used black to
> do it". By the time the idiots figured out that the real problem was
> that I was bored to death of the crap they kept handing me to do, they
> had managed to put me a whole year behind in math. Luckily, I was like
> 6-7 years *ahead* in reading. lol

Did you just say "the education system is fundamentally broken"?

I remember seeing a psychologist. Part of the conversation went like this:

"What were you thinking about just now?"
"Crystals."
"OK. Tell me about crystals."
"Nah, you wouldn't really be interested. I can tell."
"How can you tell?"
"The frames of your glasses are grey."

Now, considering I was, like, 9 years old, most people would have just 
laughed that off. This guy looked actually terrified that I was able to 
READ HIS MIND just by the colour of his glasses. Literally, he was 
desperately trying to figure out how I knew. Obviously, I didn't "know" 
anything. I was just being daft.

It's like nerd-sniping. http://xkcd.com/356/ Apparently psychologists 
are really, *really* easy to confuse.

>> I was always quite bad at arithmetic. I still am. The difference is that
>> today, I use a frigging *computer* to do the work for me. :-P My job is
>> to figure out what the actual calculation is; the computer does the
>> mundane work of actually *running* it.
>>
> Yeah. Same here, more or less. I can't do math in my head worth shit,
> and I hate doing it by hand on paper.

I find doing /arithmetic/ on paper to be trivially easy. It's just not 
particularly interesting. I quite often do /math/ on paper - mainly due 
to the difficulty of typing most of the notation on a computer.

> Shortcuts would help, but you don't get those in school.

I haven't been to school in a long time. I hear they no longer teach 
"mathematics". They teach "numeracy". And it doesn't involve knowing how 
to add and subtract and multiply and divide. They only teach you how to 
/estimate/ results.

I have no idea whether this is true, or just what the media tells us.

>> I spent almost all of my time at
>> college sat in the library, absorbing everything I could lay my hands on.
>>
> Should probably do that myself. The problem is figuring out where the
> hell my gaps are to start with, then finding something that doesn't bore
> the hell out of me reading it

My problem is that I know a lot of quite advanced (i.e., interesting) 
mathematics, but I don't know some of the stuff that comes before that. 
Normally you would learn the simple stuff first, gradually moving on to 
the more advanced stuff. Which means there are books full of simple 
stuff, and books full of advanced stuff. And to fill the gaps in my 
knowledge, I'd have to read one of the "introductory" books where I 
already know 95% of what it says, just to learn the 5% that I haven't 
stumbled across yet.

> like, I don't know, something directed at
> "application" of the math, not just how the hell you write the
> equations. I think this is a huge damn failing in "text books", and
> classes in general. Its one thing to hand someone a formula, or even a
> stupidly simply thing you want someone to do, like graphing a line, but
> give no possible context for why the hell anyone would bother to do so,
> save maybe some historical context. Its quite a bit different when you
> "need" to know, for your own purposes, how thick a rope will get, wound
> onto a spindle, and thus how big the spindle needs to be, versus just
> having someone hand you a problem, and ask you to give them a result,
> when your only thought is likely to be, "Why the hell do I need this?"
> Mind, that was physics class, while the normal math classes don't even
> give you problems that come even remotely close to that interesting. In
> any case, I don't remember the equations. lol

It depends.

Sometimes I just want to solve a specific problem. But I do also enjoy 
reading about mathematical objects and their properties just for the 
hell of doing so. It's interesting. (I suspect if you had to do this for 
an actual *test*, it would become much less interesting...) For example, 
reading about polynomials and all the patterns and symmetries they have. 
And /then/, when you find yourself needing to solve some problem that 
happens to involve polynomials, you already know quite a bit about them, 
and therefore where to start looking for a solution.

> Nah.. Stupidity desirable? How could that ever be the case. I mean, its
> not like, at least in the US, there are politicians banking on it,
> products sold based on playing fast and loose with as little information
> as possible, or active attempts to undermine education. That is just
> absurd! Or, in reality, as I put it a bit ago when talking about the US
> version of libertarianism - "The concept is simple, lower taxes,
> resulting in poorer schools, resulting in closed schools, and since its
> everyone's 'right' to choose to be ignorant, the fact that 90% of the
> population is stupid has nothing to do with the failure of the system,
> its entirely the fault of people not moving to where the only two
> schools still open are located."

WOW. O_O

> Dear old Madison would be having a
> heart attack at this shit, if he hadn't had the sad misfortune of dying
> in 1836.

...irony...

> I seems only fitting that by 2036 the US might be so fucking stupid that
> they couldn't build a log cabin from his time, let alone work out why
> living in one would be preferable to huddling under a tree, or wearing
> animal skins in a cave... Or, so it sometimes seems the trajectory of
> some of this stupid shit is headed.

I think sometimes it's hard to tell whether the entire world is stupid, 
or just a vocal minority.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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