In the 4th paragraph he describes “the arc of a stone falling to earth” as an exponential function. Is that true? I always thought it was quadratic.
He did say he's not a mathematician
Math Team
11–20 of 106 posts
Re: Math Team
#12I'm from Scandinavia, and I always find it both fascinating and alien how much focus the US system puts on extracurriculars - and more specifically competitive extracurricular activities.
On one side, it is probably good to motivate pupils to aim for something, and get good at it - but on the other side, you obviously end up with a bunch of kids that are just really good at grinding away - even if their heart is not there. And must become some obligatory thing, because everyone else is doing it.
FWIW, over here academics is the only thing that maters. There are no entrance exams, no personal letter, no letter of recommendation, no extracurricular activities. Your GPA is the only thing that maters.
(Of course, that also has its downsides. People end up re-taking HS exams year after year, because someone beat their GPA with a decimal point.)
Re: Math Team
#13Interesting. Maybe I'm significantly older (graduated high school in the early 90's) than the poster, but math team was a big deal at my high school. So much so that my school fielded 3 teams (A, B, and C) for regional competitions. At local meets, A and B teams typically always came in first and second respectively, with C (only a partial team) coming in third or fourth. A team also won the state championships twice.
In general, it was pretty low key. Local meets were every month or so, practice was about 2 hours a week, though we did more for states. At no point did I think about the impact on my college admissions, and I don't recall it coming up in conversation with anyone else.
(warning: humblenrag) In fact, the only real negative memory I have was that the individual high scorers got graphing calculators until the year I had the high score and got a calculus textbook. Of course, when I got to college and had to pay for textbooks, I learned that the calculus text probably was more expensive than the calculator.
Re: Math Team
#14The author writes a decent essay, but the claims that he makes about the mathematics curriculum don't really line up with my own experience of the subject, and I suspect has nothing to do with his actual trauma.
This passage sticks out to me:
>I kept getting put into advanced mathematics classes while missing core concepts from previous years.... Eventually I was in classes with no standard curriculum at all, classes that had names like Discrete Mathematics and Advanced Topics II. To this day I have no idea what level of math they were meant to correspond to.
I don't know how an adult who has spent so much time actually trying to learn mathematics can maintain the hallucination that math is organized into "levels". The lack of a standard curriculum is an actual fucking blessing. God forbid someone except for the bureaucrats at pearson/macmillan and whatever federal committee decides on the standard curriculum for K-12 get to plan a math course. The author's opinion on this is backwards.
Moreover, he wasn't "lacking the core concepts" needed to take on these elementary topics, because there aren't any. That's the point. Math is built from nothing.
Second, you can feel the resentment in the author's voice when he talks about his friend who became a mathematician of sorts. And that resentment is that his friend is actually interested in mathematics. This is an interesting insight, but it's unrelated to his thesis.
We can gain more insight into the author's world view by considering some of his other essays. In "Math Team", he lists an impressive set of extra curriculars, but for some reason shies away from the mention of his church. However in [1] we see the following:
>Church was a big time commitment for us. We had prayer meetings on Tuesday night, Friday night youth group, Sunday services and Sunday school, and then Bible study later at night.
This is an altogether different account of how his time was spent as a youth. Maybe it's important to the author not to place anything online which would cause conflict with his parents, but it seems to me that the obvious thing putting too much pressure on his childhood time is this.
This essay on church is generally full of contradictions as well, for instance:
> [Church] makes it hard to be honest. In church we valued having deep, personal conversations with each other, but it felt like people always held something back.
followed not two paragraphs later by the exact opposite claim:
> It’s easier to trust a group of people if you know that you are all committed to the same things.
In [2], the author concludes with a summary of what he believes faith to be:
>Faith is not a process for choosing what to believe in or what to commit to. It is a tool for helping with what comes next. Creeping doubt and regression to status quo is natural, even in the absence of any new evidence. Faith is the virtue of counteracting that regression, through repeated internalization of those truths and commitments.
The conclusion I draw from this collection of essays, is that the author knows exactly what was wrong, but considers it a virtue to lie to themselves about it. Perhaps denying your natural doubts can sometimes be good for you, but to me it sounds a lot more like the spike protein on the mind virus of Christianity wreaking havoc. Regardless, if you're not willing to engage with your doubts, then you have no business putting your thoughts into an essay under the pretense of intellectual honesty.
1: https://www.benedict.one/2020/12/09/church-and-community/ 2: https://www.benedict.one/2020/03/02/faith/
Re: Math Team
#15In the 4th paragraph he describes “the arc of a stone falling to earth” as an exponential function. Is that true? I always thought it was quadratic.
I can confirm, in classical mechanics, flat gravitional fields give paths that follow quadratic trajectories.
Re: Math Team
#16The high school math Olympiad team is the fondest memory of mine. It was like solving puzzle games every day. But I guess if you are forced into puzzle games when you don’t like it can be a torture. I also changed my career to tech but I still look fondly back into the days when I could be immersed into solving problems without getting pulled into various meetings.
Re: Math Team
#17Although I empathize with the struggle of the journey, having gone through a similar path of math team -> Stanford (where I briefly ran into the author), I think this is a particularly uncharitable characterization of math competitions.
Yes, there are many students (even more these days) that are in the grind for the accolades and college admissions, but math competitions were genuinely my favorite part of high school. They helped hone my problem solving, grit (!), work ethic, social skills, and leadership skills in a way that I continue to see pay off 15 years later. I am forever grateful for my high school teacher who supported me during this time.
It helped that I was actually passionate about it, which I think is the underlying point here. Weird constructs like math competitions that help kids channel their passions? Incredible. Forced hoop-jumping for the purpose of college admissions? Horrible.
Re: Math Team
#18The author writes a decent essay, but the claims that he makes about the mathematics curriculum don't really line up with my own experience of the subject, and I suspect has nothing to do with his actual trauma. This passage sticks out to me: >I kept getting put into advanced mathematics classes while missing core concepts from previous years.... Eventually I was in classes with no standard curriculum at all, classes…
The author mentions "dropping [his] religion" here [1], which undercuts the idea that he is lying to himself about his religious doubts.
I don't think much good comes from analyzing a private stranger in this way, especially given such limited evidence.
Re: Math Team
#19The author writes a decent essay, but the claims that he makes about the mathematics curriculum don't really line up with my own experience of the subject, and I suspect has nothing to do with his actual trauma. This passage sticks out to me: >I kept getting put into advanced mathematics classes while missing core concepts from previous years.... Eventually I was in classes with no standard curriculum at all, classes…
Nice take-down, and I appreciate the points you raise, but isn't
> if you're not willing to engage with your doubts, then you have no business putting your thoughts into an essay under the pretense of intellectual honesty.
kind of talking about every essay, ever? The only people free from doubt are on ventilators and definitely aren't writing a lot of essays. The very act of writing an essay is engaging with (a few of) your doubts. And if you're writing it for others to read, you're painting it over with some level of pretense.
Just because he's not engaging with your personal hobby horse of uncritically accepted Christianity doesn't mean he doesn't have something to say. Show me a being with a pure mind, free of any self-contradiction or self-avoidance.
Really, please do, so I can pet it and make it wag its tail.
> the author knows exactly what was wrong, but considers it a virtue to lie to themselves about it.
As do we all. Only the topic varies.
Re: Math Team
#20The high school math Olympiad team is the fondest memory of mine. It was like solving puzzle games every day. But I guess if you are forced into puzzle games when you don’t like it can be a torture. I also changed my career to tech but I still look fondly back into the days when I could be immersed into solving problems without getting pulled into various meetings.
Same. Not American so perhaps the experience is different across the ocean, but it was truly magical. As an awkward, weird kid that didn't really know what to do with himself it was life changing.
My former team is still alive and going strong, and after uni I went back as a coach. I still hear the same stories about how awesome the group is, and how kids that now are in the same position as I was find it a "safe space", if you will.