Recent content by spero14159

I can sympathies with you regarding your viewpoint on calculus :-) Unfortunately calculus carries a lot of weight in exams and that affected me in a negative way. I have always been fascinated by calculus though. Differentiation is easy, but integration is like a puzzle. I am slowly getting...

I too prefer hard sciences when it comes to discussions and debates, but I rarely catch myself subconsciously thinking about math the way I think about biology, physics and other much more grounded subjects. This happens because physics, biology etc have lots of real world context cues, and our...

You hate math because you are parroting it. Philosophy is easy to grasp. It is also very engaging and stimulates your brain to think on its own. In order to become good at math, you must find a way to similarly engage your imagination and get inspired to think beyond your textbook problems...

Well, I could neither edit nor delete that incomplete post. So I reported it. Allow me to start anew. I will do away with lists and categorizations this time. I wish I had a teacher like you. I know how to solve specific types of problems, but I don't know how to approach an unknown problem...

So Maurer, Keck, and Schultz pretty much sulked in their offices while you people did the actual work? Sigh. I wonder how common this occurrence is in modern R&D industry. Congratulations for the success of your team. Thanks to your work, fiber optic became a thing long before the concept of...

Books are not necessarily wrong, but the teaching style is often wrong. If a student finds an authoritative book unhelpful, it usually means that the student was taught a bunch of hand rules, not the basics.

Congratulations for your academic success. Intelligence alone did not take you there. There are three essential qualities: intelligence, ambition, and perseverance. I can motivate students to aim for the stars, but there is nothing I can do about the intelligence level of a student. Intelligent...

I walk around a lot while thinking. That means I may be kinesthetic. I need to find some authoritative resources on kinesthetic learning to find out how to optimally teach this type of students.

Thanks for the resources. I have something to say about that quiz. I am not a fan of self-reporting in psychological assessment. I took the test, and came up 65.71% kinesthetic. This is utterly wrong. I can't write and think at the same time. When I take notes, I do it mechanically. I was...

Any idea how to conduct that test? Do I simply perform an auditory and a visual presentation and take a quiz on those to see which one the student understood best? I don't think kinesthetic presentation is an option in higher math, and there is no way auditory presentation alone will be enough...

Last response was a mess. I was talking about myself more than my students. Evaluation standard comes from a different issue, which does not require immediate attention in this discussion. I explained it, but then retracted it. I need to form a core theory before dealing with cultural issues...

But then we return to giving a man a fish instead of teaching him how to fish. They will likely get stuck again while doing their PhD and post-doctoral work. I am not a fan of keeping a terminal patient alive on life support. It will be more merciful to tell the student that he/she has no future...

I am very disappointed in our teachers after learning the concept of learning center. That concept is totally foreign to me. The very top universities in our nation (IIT, ISI, IISC) have something conceptually similar. They put so heavy workload on students that students cannot afford to leave...

Thanks for the pointer. I will check it. That would have made my job easier. We don't really have any significant number of dropouts in India. They stick to the program until the very end only to leave with average grades :-( They are aware. They just can't help themselves. Do you think that...

This one may sound like a rant, so please forgive me if I am generalizing a lot. In my student life as well as teaching career, I have noticed an alarming trend that makes me question the worthiness of my profession. The only type of students that I (as well as other teachers I have seen in...