Inertia in Physics for Physics Majors (name of the class).
I did all of the problem sets, sort of. I’d take a crack and the question and get it completely wrong. THen the TA would answer the question in tutorial and it would make sense. Then I’d try another question and you guessed it, completely wrong. Now repeat the process over and over again.
When we wrote our test I was completely lost. My only hope was to answer the questions as comically as possible and hope the teacher was in a good mood and willing to give bonus points (I’ve managed that in the past). She wasn’t. I managed something like 19% on the test. What made it worse was the guy beside me got 99% and was arguing with the teacher about the 1% he missed.
Ironically the next section was relativity and I did reasonably well at that (it’s a sliding scale, I suppose).
Incidentally I passed the class with a 68 thanks mostly to lab work. Things always seemed to click when I’d see it first hand in the lab.
My Waterloo was the Human Biology program at my school. They taught a 2 hour back-to-back class of chemistry and biology. At 9AM. I was all over the biology, but chemistry? It made me long for the halcyon days of high school where the teacher could take the time to explain things in small words for idiots like me at a reasonable hour in the day.
Surprisingly early, especially considering I was a straight A student who had parents and teachers convinced I was brilliant.
I didn’t see my alleged brilliance. I knew I was very good at retaining and regurgitating trivia, and always did very well on standardized tests, which always seemed ridiculously easy.
But whereas I could memorize the steps of mitosis, I didn’t really have a clue what was happening. I could tell teachers what DNA stood for, but couldn’t really understand what it was made of or what it did. I could recite steps in a mathematical proof in the right order, but it was never second nature to me.
So, I felt like a fraud when I was receiving all those academic awards- I never felt I was as smart as I was supposed to be.
For me, the thing that really hammered it home was the 6 years I spent teaching Computer Science at night at a local university.
I taught a lot of classes in those 6 years, and in every class I taught…every single class, I could clearly identify at least one student that I knew, without a doubt, was smarter than me. Not had more on the ball, not worked harder, but simply had more raw horsepower up there than I did.
This wasn’t Harvard or Princeton, either.
(As a side note, I suspect this may be one reason why some professors had a real 'tude and acted like assholes sometimes; it was their way of compensating for this. I always felt that I was there for the students, to impart some of my knowledge to them…which I suspect is why I didn’t have a problem with it. Outside the classroom, though, it took some work to come to grips with this revelation.)
(Slight hijack from a budding mathematician who can’t help but answer a question earlier in the thread)
What the fundamental theorem of calculus does is allow us to use an anti-derivative of a function to calculate its integral. Without this theorem, to integrate a function we would have to come up with a guess for its value, then try and prove it using the analytic definition of a integral as a limit of sums, which is NOT easy to work with. Having the FTofC allows us to sidestep all that if the function we want to integrate has an anti-derivative, and thankfully the majority functions do, making integration in general much easier than it would be otherwise.
If you’re asking what good is integration, well there really are hundreds of applications. One off the top of my head: The technique of Fourier analysis uses integration to extract the frequencies that “make up” a signal, such as the spectrum analyzer on your stereo.
As to the OP, I think I met my limits after scoring in the single digits on the Putnam Exam for two years in a row, while realizing that there were people that scored over 100 on the very same test.
Got a final on the FTOC in 33 hours. Same situation. Just kind of holding on for dear life, hoping my brain catches up eventually. :eek:
Funny in that going back to school, my situation is completely opposite than it was when I was in high school and going through higher education the first time. Before, I was conditioned to tests from 12 years in school. I knew how to do the problems and forget it mere hours later.
Now I have the OPPOSITE problems. I now have a much greater appreciation for applications and significance…but absolutely, no matter how hard I try and how much work I do, I can’t seem to retain the information at all. I understand the ideas behind Calculus as well as I’ve understood anything…I just can’t seem to do it.
Freshman year of college, I didn’t want to be bothered with “boring” languages like French or Spanish, so, against the advice of my adviser, I took Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphs as my foreign language. I was the only undergrad in the class. I studied my ass off (3-4 hours a night) and still got D’s on every test. I worked harder than I ever had before and just…didn’t…get…it. And I am good at pictographic languages! Since then, as I get older, I just feel dumber and dumber.
(An aside to Silver Tyger Girl: You will not be successful teaching yourself Japanese, especially if you don’t keep at it every single day. At the very least, you need to start taking classes, with real conversation and such. Or move to Japan. Or have a Japanese best friend.)
Ha. Freshman year of college. First quarter. I can’t coast anymore? I need to study? Aw, fuck. I don’t know how to really study! Stuff just stays in my brain! (The older I get, the less this happens, of course.) Thank goodness mine was a technical major. I really lucked out there. I can’t imagine if I’d gone to a liberal arts college like I originally thought I would.
Then I tried to minor in art history. Gah! One class and I ran into the safe arms of philosophy. And hit another wall, but struggled through it and actually started understanding stuff. That’s weird–when I’m reading philosophy, it’s almost like I disconnect my “self” from my brain and watch it churn through the text and dump out meaning in front of me.
Calculus wasn’t a problem for me–had an awesome professor who explained things in English. (And it was a business calc class, too, so I had examples I could easily understand.) Accounting (took my C and was happy with it), statistics (by rights, I deserved a D, but the curve on the final brought me up to a B by some miracle), and college physics (hardest B I ever got in my life–with nightly tutoring from my fiance) were awful.
But if you already speak SQL and don’t particularly speak Excel, Access is by far your better choice for many things. And some databases are a bit too big for Excel, aren’t they? Of course, they get to be too big for Access PDQ as well. Oracle - that’s the ticket!
My first job interview right before I graduated college. I majored in English and the only interviewer who would talk to me was from a bank. The guy’s jaw literally dropped when he realized how little I understood about the banking industry.
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m only a genius at things that won’t make me rich or get me laid.
Many of you have posted " when I ran into “such and such” as a limit. Yet you have also posted a wide variety of specializations that I could learn (or have already learned about).
The trick is to put a loaded gun in your mouth and ask your self - can I learn about this, or can i pull the trgger? A horrifying image, indeed, but given talented teachers, and your own motivation you CAN learn about it.
So, don’t say you can not, or claiom it as a limit.
A good friend of mine has down’s syndrome. He is 54. He spent the first 29 years of his life in an institution. His social/emotional IQ is about a zillion- this guy can be friends with almost anyone…He learned, with the help of a VERY talented therapist the basics of the so called life skills. He can balance a checkbook, show up at work on time and pay his bills.
He had a job as a lot attendant with Home Depot back in the early 80’s. He bought into their employee stock sharing program…Because of stock sharing programs, and the fact that he religiously banked most of his income, he became a millionaire. His case became known to me as a manager at Home Depot as he made an “official” appointment to talk to me about his stock program. He asked if it was right that his sister was trying to take control of his wealth (he had attracted her attention by buying the house in which he rented the basement suite). It turned out he was worth more than 1.1 million cdn dollars, less the price of the house he bought, and the rental income from the two suite upstiars. Home Depot came to his rescue, and the court basically asked the sister… “What are you worth?”
She was worth less. (nice pun)
David has since retired. He still lives in the basement suite. He has a really nice home theatre, and only rents to clients that his social instinct tells him to. So far he has never had a bad renter.
Sure David is limited by a lack of intellegence. But MAN I wish I was as smart as him.
First was AP calculus in 12th grade. I had been a perfectly fine student in every respect before that, but calculus absolutely baffled me, and I’m sure it would to this day had I given it a moment’s thought during the past six years. I just completely, 100% did not understand anything that was going on in that class.
I somehow, inexplicably, passed the AP test, but I think I only got a B in the class because my teacher liked me.
The second was symbolic logic in college. Nothing in any of the classes for my philosophy major had given me any trouble at all, and then all of the sudden I came up against that monstrosity. Within the first two weeks, I had absolutely no clue whatsoever what was going on. I went to office hours and left more confused than before. I would look at homework assignments, and the symbols on the page might as well have been written in Cuneiform. I had never been so stumped in my life.
I dropped out of the class before the first exam, but I eventually had to tackle it again in order to finish my degree. I have no idea how I made it out of that class with a C.
This. I think it was actually called Vector Calculus at Hopkins. I AP tested out of Calc 1, I breezed through Calc 2 with an A with minimal effort… but Vector Calculus kicked my ass pretty hard.
I rebounded extremely well in the non-math subjects, but when it comes to math, I’ll never be the same. The non-math subjects are waiting for that Law School wall in the next year or two . . .
