Grumpiness in New, Seasonal Flavours

[Inquisitor]

*bows to your superior destructive power*

[Patriotic Kaz]

Wow what goons...im rofling or was before typing this...and shaggy southern baptist don't do anything nicely and the fight isn't worth it

[Peter Ahlstrom]

This forum is not a chatroom...there's no reason to keep going back and forth with the same two people.

[Inquisitor]

Back on topic, the people at the car dealership want to total my car instead of fixing it 

[Shaggy]

Math is really hard…we're doing Projectile Motion now and it's really confusing.  Test/big-quiz next Wednesday. 

[ryos]

Math is really hard…we're doing Projectile Motion now and it's really confusing.  Test/big-quiz next Wednesday. 

Since when is that math? Sure, you USE math, but it's a physics problem.

This is one of my pet peeves about math classes. Physics problems don't belong in the curriculum, because there isn't space to do them justice. After completing the brief section on projectile motion, you will know so little about it that you won't be able to apply it to anything real, and in the process, you learned nothing new about math.

[Shaggy]

It's math. :::

h(t)=(-1/2)gt²+V₀t+h₀

This is the given, where h(t) equals the height h after t seconds, g equals the gravitation constant (either roughly 9.8 meters per second or roughly 32 feet per second), t equals the time in seconds, V₀ equals the intial velocity, and h₀ equals the initial height.

[ryos]

That's a result derived from Newton's laws that can only be applied in specific situations. Which you'll learn...if you take physics in college. What mathematical tool do you gain by learning that? None! To apply that function, all you need is simple arithmetic (and maybe algebra to solve for an unknown). They're not teaching math - they're teaching a physics tool of limited application.

What business does the math department have teaching physics? That was the point of my rant.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Functions like that are generally accompanied by learning to graph them, and then in calculus you learn to take their derivative. It's the same reasoning as story problems dealing with money—finding a real-world application for the underlying math so the students maybe won't think it's a waste of time.

[Shaggy]

Physics…that's offered in 11th grade at my school. Would it be the same course as the one you are talking about, probably?

[ryos]

Physics…that's offered in 11th grade at my school. Would it be the same course as the one you are talking about, probably?

Yeah...though, at the high school level, I don't know if they'd teach you how to derive things from first principles. Pray they don't, actually.

Functions like that are generally accompanied by learning to graph them, and then in calculus you learn to take their derivative. It's the same reasoning as story problems dealing with money—finding a real-world application for the underlying math so the students maybe won't think it's a waste of time.

Yeah, there's that I suppose. By now, though, I've had the usefulness of math sufficiently beaten into me that I don't need those application problems to motivate me to learn the tools.

Also, I've had enough of physics and engineering (at one point I thought I wanted to be a chemical engineer) to know that the "applications" they teach you in math classes are all but worthless for actually applying math to real problems in real fields. So, these problems have the opposite effect on me than was desired: I feel like they're a major waste of time.

It's even worse at BYU. The Physics and Engineering departments don't force you to memorize formulas for tests, but the Math department does, so doing application problems unnecessarily bloats the memorization load.

[Shaggy]

Apparently math is 'training your brain to think in certain ways.' 

[Peter Ahlstrom]

I had to memorize formulas for 400-level astrophysics classes at BYU.

[The Jade Knight]

I haven't take Math in some 10 years... I never took it at college...

Grumpiness:  That awesome French manual I found is actually just a translation from German.  Le sigh.

[readerMom]

The Math & Physics departments at BYU are (were? it's been 12 years) so connected I could get a math minor while majoring in physics without taking any other classes. I hated all the math classes there until 443, differential equations, but then I like the idea of mathematics.
Memorization is a good skill to have, though physicists tend to have a non-memorization ego thing, to judge by the comments of several physicists in books I have read.
Of course I then ended up with minors in both math and physics and an English major, but that had more to do with needing to finish school quickly than the school itself.