Day two of classes

[mari4212]

Animal Behavior: I already knew I loved the teacher for this class, so I was really looking forward to it. And from what I can tell, I really will enjoy all but fifteen minutes of it. We have to do an oral presentation. In front of the class. Talking. *whimpers* Speaking in public is one of my main freak-out bits. I hate being the center of attention, I hate being in front of a lot of people, why do I always get involved in classes with public speaking bits?! And yes, that deserved the double punctuation bit, even if I normally hate doing so. *breathes*

Okay, so there's going to be a bit of me freaking out about that. But the rest of the class looks like it will be wonderful, and I've already made friends with the girl who sits next to me. She's also in my Eco-Evo class. Now I just have to remember what her name is.

Now on to the part I know at least my parents have been worrying about. The dreaded Physics. I'm either going to hate this guy as a teacher, or love him. He loves the math part of the class and says that he's going to show us some calculus because theoretically it'll actually make the course easier. This, of course, presupposes that we'll be able to understand the calculus. On the bright side, his grading scale gives us more latitude, he's promised he'll be in his office and available to help a lot, and he doesn't spend forever reiterating the same idea twelve times without explaining how to do the maths part, which was what really drove me nuts with Dr. Reilly.

Aside from classes, I've been working my hours at the library. Freshman year, I really lucked out when I got to work at the library. It's a great environment with lots of free time. Everybody there has come up to me to tell me how great it is to see me back, and I do mean everybody. I've also made a new friend, one of the freshman workers. She happened to notice which author I was reading, and we instantly bonded over mutual love of Mercedes Lackey's writing. I'm going to drag her into Quidditch Club and Medieval Society, and I don't think she'll mind a bit.

The only bad thing about working at the library is that the main supervisor asked me not to bring in my knitting. She thinks it looks "unprofessional" to have it at the main desk. My immediate supervisors never minded, but she's the big boss, she gets to make the decisions. Me, I always thought that knitting was better than reading, because I have a tendency to get lost in my books and not notice if a patron needs help for a while.

Comments

[vaudy.livejournal.com]

Note to self: when I'm in charge of a library, not only will knitting be allowed, it will be encouraged.

[mari4212.livejournal.com]

Hmm, someday I'm going to have to come work for you. If I ever get bored with doing PT and don't decide to become a priest instead.

And that one sentence probably explains a great deal about my insanity.

[vaudy.livejournal.com]

Heh, when I was thinking about going back to school, I was deciding between going back into pre-vet, which was what I had wanted to do in high school and never did (though I was accepted to a program), and majoring in English or another humanities field to go into Library Science (not that a humanities field is necessary for Library Science, anything will do; it's just that I wasn't subjecting myself to chemistry and physics unless absolutely necessary).

I have a cousin who was thinking about getting a Master's degree in Counseling, so she could marry a pastor and do counseling through the church, and I badly wanted to tell her that she should aim higher and get a Master's degree so she could be a pastor. I never did, because she's Baptist and that sort of thing doesn't fly with them, and I didn't want to listen to a lecture about what a woman's place is.

[mari4212.livejournal.com]

Preaching to the choir here on that. The Episcopal church has had women priests and bishops since before I was born. My parents had the first regularly ordained female priest in the Diocese of Pennslyvania assisting at their marriage.

[mel06.livejournal.com]

i ♥ working at my school library. The boss boss is a knitter herself, so she chuckles when I bring in mine.


Also, Eco/Ev >> everything else. And if you ever need physics assistance, do give me a ping.

[mari4212.livejournal.com]

I might take you up on that offer. The thing is, I'm a verbal-linguistics person who fell in love with a science-based career. That means I have to take the science-major version of physics. And I run into problems because I don't do higher mathmatics well. The basics, I'm fine with. Basic algebra and a bit of geometry, I'm also great. High-level algebra and calculus? I hit a wall in my brain.

And yes, Eco/Evo is intense love.

[elvisvf101.livejournal.com]

Physics without calculus is like chocolate chocolate chip cookies without milk.

It should be a crime to have one without the other.

Don't sweat the calculus. Just know what a derivative and an integral are and that should be more than enough. Also, if you have your old calculus textbook, it may be handy to refer to the tables of integrals and derivatives in case you don't know whose butt they pull the various formulas that will be foisted upon you.

[mari4212.livejournal.com]

See, that explains a lot. I drink tea with my cookies, not milk.

My problem is that invariably I hit a wall with higher mathmatics. I need to understand why something works before I can do things with it, but at a certain point in math they tell you to just memorize the formulas because you won't be able to understand why they work for another three years. I can't work like that, so problems ensue. My mother has the same problem, it's something I inherit from her.

[vaudy.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad I'm not the only one with this problem. Both my brother and my now-former roommate (OT, I have too many former roommates) told me the same thing, to just learn how to do it and understand later, but understanding is very important to my recall ability. I can't learn things by rote if I don't understand.

[mari4212.livejournal.com]

Yes! That's it exactly. I need to understand the broad concept, and then the details, including the formulas, will slot into place. But if I don't understand why those formulas work? It won't happen.

My problem is that I'm a verbal-linguistic person who chose a science major. Luckily, Biology works for me because I can understand the broad principles of evolution and genetics. Math is too arbitrary.

Back Asswards

[elvisvf101.livejournal.com]

I concur that math is basically taught backwards in the educational system. See, math didn't really exist until a bunch of scientists ran into problems they didn't know how to solve and had to start inventing ways to solve them.

After 14 years in the primary and secondary educational system, and 2 more years of college math, I concluded that I learned absolutely nothing in the first 14. They never told us why we were learning math, just that we'd need it. Upon reaching college math, I quickly learned that all the stuff we learned for the first 14 years was just stuff to learn HOW to do college math. It seems like a very convoluted way to do things, since math has no discernable goal for the first 14 years or so. Upon learning calculus, it becomes clear why you'd need all that stuff you learned before.

Going a step further, calculus has no discernable goal until you get to physics. Upon learning how all those random formulas are related to each other, it becomes a little more clear as to why you might need calculus, since everything is in terms of rates, and therefore, integrals and derivatives.

So, based upon this little rant here, in my humble opinion, to truly understand physics takes about 18 years worth of pure and total mathematical confusion.

This is usually why we say, just get the gist and worry about the nitty gritty later.

But by no means should you ever ever ever just memorize formulas. See, that's why God invented the table of integrals. As long as you know that you are supposed to do a little calculus and you know what calculus is, you're ok.

If you don't know the integral of (3x^2)(e^-4x^2) with respect to x, don't worry, you can still do physics. Let someone else do the calculus. That's what physicists do anyway sometimes. Get some poor grad student to sweat the numbers while they worry about the theory.

[glacierscout.livejournal.com]

One of the exercises we do on Wood Badge is that each individual partol member evaluates their greatest fear by ranking a whole bunch of scary topics - illness, death, spiders, heights. Then the patrol gets together, and comes up with a common answer, based on all of their individual fears. At the end, I reveal the results of a national survey. The exercise is designed to show people they can come up with a better answer as a group.

The national survey says the number one fear is speaking in public. severe illness is number 2, and fifnancial difficulties is 3. Death is 9.

So most people think that speaking in public is more fearful than dying..

[mari4212.livejournal.com]

Well, death only happens once, outside of certain sci-fi series. Public speaking you have to deal with again and again. It makes sense to me.