“All the little bits”
I would’ve absolutely paid more attention in maths if the learning material was this utterly contemptuous of “ordinary mathematicians” haha
also full Project Gutenberg text is here https://calculusmadeeasy.org/, thanks for sharing!
I’m a chemical engineer and I now better understand calculus slightly better from this post. I did a whole lot of “okkayyy …let’s just stick to the process and wait for this whole thing to blow over”
I know what they were asking me to do but I never really fully understood everything.
okkayyy…let’s just stick to the process and wait for this whole thing to blow over
This is such a classic engineer brain solution to the problem. It just warms my heart.
When I started algebra in something like 5th grade I had a huge issue with f(x) and the best answer my teacher gave me was that “the equation is a function of x” and couldn’t explain it differently and I couldn’t get over the fact that we are not multiplying whatever f is by X. “If we’re going to set precedent with notation at least be fucking consistent” - 5th grade me probably
I also studied chemical engineering, and throughout high school and university that was exactly it. Calculus was a kind of magic, and you just had to learn all the spells.
With this book I finally understood why the derivative of x^2 is 2x.
I tried to figure it out myself back in high school but the best I came up with is X^2 -->2x because it just fucking does.
I have finally discovered my niche content: math texts that are irreverent and also defiantly uncomplicated.
Read “a mathematicians lament”, by Paul Lockhart. It was originally a short essay (25 pages you can find free online), but expanded into a book that I haven’t read yet.
In a similar vein is Shape, by Jordan Ellenberg.
This reading actually helped me understand calculus a bit better, thanks for sharing!
“dMonica in my life”
There was a lovely computer science book for kids I can’t remember the name of, and it was all about the evil jargon trying to prevent people from mastering the magical skills of programming and algorithms. I love these approaches. I grew up in an extremely non/anti-academic environment, and I learned to explain things in non-academic ways, and it’s really helped me as an intro lecturer.
Jargon is the mind killer. Shorthands are for the people who have enough expertise to really feel the depths of that shorthand and use it to tickle the old familiar neurons they represent without needing to do the whole dance. It’s easy to forget that to a newcomer, the symbol is just a symbol.
I must not use jargon.
Jargon is the mind-killer.
Jargon is the little-death that brings total confusion. I will face the jargon. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the jargon has gone there will be clarity. Only sense will remain.
The most annoying thing about learning networking and security are all the acronyms! Sometimes it feels like certification tests are testing acronym memorization more than real concepts.
Definitely are.
In a way it makes sense because the industry loves its acronyms and you’ll be using them.
On the other hand, I have the ability to search. I’m an IT professional, I will have a computer. Let me let the computer do the lookup. Its the old “you won’t have a calculator with you all the time” argument that was dated when my teachers told it to me.
Absolutely! One of the difficulties that I have with my intro courses is working out when to introduce the vocabulary correctly, because it is important to be able to engage with the industry and the literature, but it adds a lot of noise to learning the underlying concepts and some assessments end up losing sight of the concept and go straight to recalling the vocab.
Knowing the terms can help you self-learn, but a textbook glossary could do the same thing.
Whenever people talk about evil jargons, or “anti-dummies” wording, the first thing that comes into my mind is lawspeak. You know, how fucking laws are worded, which are anything but obvious to people that only speak “peasant”. It’s worse than academic jargon because it’s something that is likely to be used against you.
Yeah, I may be wrong but I think it usually comes down to a very specific kind of precision needed. It’s not meant to be hostile, I think, but meant to provide a domain-specific explanation clearly to those who need to interpret it in a specific way. In law, specific jargon infers very specific behaviour, so it’s meant to be precise in its own way (not a law major, can’t say for sure), but it can seem completely meaningless if you aren’t prepped for it.
Same thing in other fields. I had a professor who was very pedantic about {braces} vs [brackets] vs (parentheses), and it seemed totally unnecessary to be so corrective in discussions, but when explaining where things went wrong with a student’s work it was vital to be able to quickly differentiate them in their work so they could review the right areas or understand things faster during a lecture later down the line.
But that noise takes longer to teach through, so if it is important, it needs it’s own time to learn, and it will make it inaccessible to anyone who didn’t get that time to learn and digest it.
