*shudder*
It has happened. Fred is learning long division and she already better at it than I am. She was doing homework and having a fit over a problem on the page so I told her to bring it to me so I could help. Little did I know long division would be tossed onto my lap! Honestly I kind of stared at the page and blinked. She pointed out the problem that was the issue and it actually wasn't the math that was stopping her it was how they wanted it written in these ridiculous little boxes. After we worked the 2 problems and put the right numbers in the right boxes I looked back over the other problems on the page and did some painful mental math to make sure they were right. She asked what I was doing and I said just double checking her work and she's all oh no need for that you just times this by that and add this and see you get my answer. I just kind of stared and blinked and said Great! Looks good.
Fractions stand alone there is NO need to add, subtract, multiply or divide them. I never liked long division, Algebra gave me headaches. When negative numbers were introduced to me I nearly died (just ask my mom). Imaginary numbers - ought to stay imaginary. I was awful at graphing. I refused to memorize formulas. Really the quadratic equation is still something after all these years I've been out of high school, I've never once had to use.
I actually enjoyed geometry, but I think a great part of the enjoyment was from my floozie zero hour teacher who wore animal print/pleather mini skirts and told us about the dates she had over the weekend.
The irony that my current profession uses various kinds of math everyday is not lost on me and it often still causes headaches!
Fractions stand alone there is NO need to add, subtract, multiply or divide them. I never liked long division, Algebra gave me headaches. When negative numbers were introduced to me I nearly died (just ask my mom). Imaginary numbers - ought to stay imaginary. I was awful at graphing. I refused to memorize formulas. Really the quadratic equation is still something after all these years I've been out of high school, I've never once had to use.
I actually enjoyed geometry, but I think a great part of the enjoyment was from my floozie zero hour teacher who wore animal print/pleather mini skirts and told us about the dates she had over the weekend.
The irony that my current profession uses various kinds of math everyday is not lost on me and it often still causes headaches!
5 comments:
imaginary numbers like imaginary friends and should just stay that way...
The hours spent trying to get Lindy and negative numbers to acknowledge each others existence were both legion and futile... some of the awesomely inventive ways we tried were cool... but ultimately futile
xoxoxox
Fred however thought base 5 was cool when she was only in 1st or 2nd grade - I still have the paper we wrote the problems on ;-}
She was way tamer by the time I had her for calculus. She was either a foster mom and trying to adopt or trying to be a foster mom....
Floozie? That's my former basketball coach you are referring to...course I still remember her telling us about her trip to Acapulco.
I have actually used the quadratic equation - but I was helping an ESL student with their math. When one kid needed help with doing matrices, I had to look in the book to remember how to do those. I remember they were fun to do back when, but my brain didn't retain the process.
I knew Math wasn't your favorite subject, but I didn't think you hated it that bad - I guess that's because we never had Math class together.
Fred can call me for help with math any time. :) I use the quadratic equation about once a month. I even have experience with long-distance tutoring. (I helped my brother-in-law with his college-level math over the web-cam.)
Biology was the class that I didn't care for, but you helped me get a good grade there. :)
--Juice
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