BadgeIsBack

Took me a while to get going (self-taught) - and many textbooks are not that helpful. Curiously it was the Dummies book that helped through the initial stumbling blocks. I also have a calculator that is a bit too good. I don't mind using calculators if I have a feel for what is going on under the hood. I figure I'm too old to worry too much about being too anal about it.

Calculus is good for those applications when you have one dimension etc and then get the optimal area etc etc. But you should not necessarily have to sweat that in your back yard. Numerical Analysis is a more useful one for me.

Like ensuring there is none!!

MartinLuther

Exactly

jond

[QUOTE=BadgeIsBack;7454566]Took me a while to get going (self-taught) - and many textbooks are not that helpful. Curiously it was the Dummies book that helped through the initial stumbling blocks. I also have a calculator that is a bit too good. I don't mind using calculators if I have a feel for what is going on under the hood. I figure I'm too old to worry too much about being too anal about it.

Calculus is good for those applications when you have one dimension etc and then get the optimal area etc etc. But you should not necessarily have to sweat that in your back yard. Numerical Analysis is a more useful one for me.









What are you lot talking about? it might as well be in Mongolian to me, but that might be something to do with me only getting a grade 5 CSE in maths

MartinLuther

I did once consider using calculus to estimate meter readings for producing electricity bills but I found a really good (Perl) module that did some sort of spline interpolation so I used that instead.

Some will find this sad but finding ways to estimate bills when you only have about 30-40% of the data (of which 10% was erroneous) was an interesting challenge.

BadgeIsBack

It was all Chinese to me 20 years ago. I was more of a 'Mong' at Advanced Maths then too.

comet555

And some are just plain wrong! I took one out of the library a couple of months ago to do a bit of refreshing and I was shocked to see one chapter had taught one of the concepts wrong. It was the chapter on inequalities. At first I thought I was losing my mind getting the questions wrong until I discovered their error. I double checked it on the internet and with my engineer husband to make sure that I was right and the book was wrong.

So if anyone out there wants to read up on Algebra, avoid this book:
Teach Yourself Visually, Algebra by David Alan Herzog.

Also, there's often little errors in answer keys in books. That always used to bug me because students would come in with all their work right and just couldn't get the answer right no matter how many times they tried it. You'd be surprised how many wrong answers make it into the textbooks.

Deutschmaster

When I saw the 'free maths tuition' title I thought that it was to do with the UK government planning on making restaurants write down the calorie content of food. Therefore the McDonalds 'free maths tuition' would be adding up all the calories in their burgers, fries etc

heg3

Well, you wouldn't have considered doing that if you didn't have good knowledge of maths.

Kids at school these days learn how to create models - power laws, exponentials, logistic and then remove outliers. They get taught how to do this by hand and using Excel. I think this is pretty good because I don't remember doing that at school.

There is always the question of what to teach kids at school but they need a braod education in order to make choices for the future. With a maths degree you can turn to probably more different fields than any other.

I have a friend whose company makes stormwater and noise reduction gratings. Every time they designed a grating in Autocad it took them half an hour to get the right spacings by trial and error, depending on shape of hole and % air. I used simple algebra and ratios to work out a general solution for him. A computer program could be written to get the same answer using a looped trial and experiment approach but the mathsy solution is much simpler and better.

MartinLuther

My original question was not because I hate maths it was more about how much should be imposed on people who don't love it. I know the maths I learnt was useful to me and I can see the beauty in it but most people I've known over time hardly use any. People often say that they haven't found any use for the maths, physics, etc... they learnt in school.

On the other side of the coin I didn't like Art (or rather the way it was taught) but feel I would have liked it more if it was more about the mechanics of art (i.e. the eyes are half way down a face, the horizon crosses objects at the height of the observer). Personally I would teach comic art as I can see this as more useful in real life to people who aren't artists (e.g. knocking up drawings in meetings, drawing storyboards to get the message across, etc..).

This discussion has been useful in answering some of the questions I have about teaching maths to my kids.

heg3

<<how much whould you impose on people who don't love it>>

That's a difficult one but we can't always expect the kids to make these desicions themselves. You can say something like "ok you have to give this a go because it's part of your broad education but if you don't like it you can give it up after three years".

If you want to study art at uni you don't need to do any maths at yr11/12. Maths isn't compulsory for an OP as far as I know. If you want to do engineering you need Maths B, English and either phys or chem.

People who don't like maths may resent being taught algebra so they should consider maths A as an OP subject.

MartinLuther

If I let them make the decision they wouldn't do any maths.

Algebra is interesting as it is one of the areas which I think is useful in real life (I've probably used this area of maths for real life stuff more than any other) but it seems to turn most people off and they don't get the benefits.