True Story
| Shelved by: duding on 2012-04-07
17 Comments:
You must have never been good at math.
I was a straight A student in math throughout my academic career (take that as you will with what that means regarding my math abilities and whatnot) and I'll be the first to say that this post is damn true. Math teachers love to pull this kind of shit.
I've also noticed a correlation between the ability of the teacher/professor, and the degree this phenomena occurs. By which I mean my shitty teachers seemed to be the worst at this :-(
The goal of a test is to see if the person learnt the material. However, from tutoring some high schoolers, I realize that many people don't develop critical thinking skills naturally, while many math books use tricky questions that unfold very quickly with critical thinking.
Put simply, they teach information, not how to think, while the problems require you to think on how to apply the information. It's one of the failures of the education system, at least where I'm from.
No doubt the goal should be to teach critical thinking, not just how to input/output information etc.
The issue is that crappy teachers don't teach critical/applied thinking. They teach the input/output style and then test the applied information style.
Critical thinking is a bigger issue than just one teacher can teach once.
I've never been asked that in maths. Stuff related to space was always kept to physics, maths was just highly improbable buying/taking/etc
We always joked that in college-level physics (we were all high school juniors and seniors), this was a typical question:
A rocket accelerates upward from the ground at 15 m/s^2 for 10 seconds. It maintains a straight trajectory from its original angle of 55 degrees above the horizontal. It then shuts off its engine and free-falls. What day is it?
Close enough (to A-level physics anyway)
Pretty sure you can google the answer on a smart fone
Not during the exam... unless your teacher is a complete fucking idiot.
Haha this made me laugh. In many of our engineering classes, the tests ask questions on things we have never covered in class. the teachers just say we should have read the book when we complain.
ummm the mass of the sun is 5mil 685thousand and 1
1.99*10^30 kg. done.
