Off My Chest
RULES:
I am looking for mods!
1. The "good" part of our community means we are pro-empathy and anti-harassment. However, we don't intend to make this a "safe space" where everyone has to be a saint. Sh*t happens, and life is messy. That's why we get things off our chests.
2. Bigotry is not allowed. That includes racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and religiophobia. (If you want to vent about religion, that's fine; but religion is not inherently evil.)
3. Frustrated, venting, or angry posts are still welcome.
4. Posts and comments that bait, threaten, or incite harassment are not allowed.
5. If anyone offers mental, medical, or professional advice here, please remember to take it with a grain of salt. Seek out real professionals if needed.
6. Please put NSFW behind NSFW tags.
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Okay except I also hated it, because all I was doing was rote memorization. Since then after many decades I've learned, mostly from places like Youtube, and I feel like I understand why people who join math competitions can be so passionate about it.
I suck at memorization and am better at figuring things out. The quadratic equation, I memorized and liked it because I could use it, just that one, to figure out the whole year of math, without memorizing anything else.
And yeah everything is slower that way, than memorizing - I have just always been constitutionally unable to do anything I don't understand. Even now, at work, I don't settle on a process I can hand off to anyone else until I do the task for like a year, a bunch of different ways.
It’s much better if you derive the quadratic equation. I don’t understand why more algebra 2 teachers don’t show the derivation from completing the square. I always do, and my students get it down quick!
I get it, I'm lucky one of my interests as a kid was math, it is comfy in knowing there is a clear final answer to a problem in algebra (even more when there are multiple ways to tackle the same problem)
The issue here is on the education system, aside from the topic (math, grammar, literature), if a kid is not engaged at all then it won't do shit and will learn to use whatever tools they have to just skip it altogether