151–152 of 152 posts
"Sorry, education reformers, it’s still memorization and repetition we need." This is very true. For example, doing the advanced engineering calculus can often boil down to manipulating polynomial, which are still arithmetic. A person with "understanding" but no fluency in basic arithmetic is setup to fail.
Done, and done better and faster than you could possibly do it.
As someone who graduated with a math minor and promptly forgot the vast majority of what he learned, something that really messed me up were gaps in my education. For example, I took a graduate level course in the foundations of mathematics (proving natural numbers and arithmetic). I grasped the lectures, but one day I was completely stumped by a step in the proof where algebra was performed across an inequality. I h…
What do you mean by "algebra across an inequality"? (Does this mean things like "x < y is equivalent to 5 + x < 5 + y"?)