vanesch said:
- most stuff you'll do in real life is intellectually WAY below the level you reach in grad school. MOST of what you do will be highly trivial if you get into a "real life" job. Only now and then you will be able to use, say, 10% of the intellectual power you acquired.
Very good point. 90% of research is following instructions/recipes/manuals. It IS trivial. But, that's not why you get a Ph.D. You get a Ph.D. to do the other 10% of the work that requires knowing what questions need to be asked, how you will use those "trivial" tools to accomplish it, how you will interpret the results you get from it, and how it fits into the bigger picture of other scientific findings.
So consider a trivial assignment as a training for life "out there"
Do you think it takes sophisticated math to get a budget in balance when you're managing a project ?
Just learning to read a question carefully and answer the question asked (i.e., follow instructions) is a skill many people lack, and is what will prevent them from moving up in the world.
Do you think you need sophisticated combinatorics to plan a set of meetings with co-workers in your agenda ?
Maybe. I sometimes joke that the hardest part of obtaining a Ph.D. is getting 4 or 5 busy committee members all into the same room on the same day and time.
There are a few other issues raised. First, if you cannot control yourself and your temper enough to stop and NOT write insults and rude remarks on the page you're actually doing your assignment on, then you have bigger problems than doing trivial homework assignments. There's a lesson in self-control and professionalism that needs to be learned there...or maybe just plain common sense! It's one thing to utter some swears as you're struggling through a boring assignment (then again, if the assignment were trivial, why aren't you just thrilled to have such a quick problem set you can bang through in no time?), but if you're sitting there wasting your time writing them out and then needing to rewrite what would have been a quick assignment to complete, just making it longer, then you only have yourself to blame for the wasted time and effort.
Another thing that vanesch touched upon, but I want to emphasize, is that your teachers/instructors/professors have reasons for the assignments they give. If you don't see the reason why it is relevant, you may not be fully understanding what you are being taught in the class. If trig is essential to the higher order problems you'll be needing to solve in the course, then it makes perfect sense to make sure the class is all up to speed on trig before moving along. Remember, graded assignments are not just for your practice, they are also a means for the teacher to assess where the class' knowledge level is. If everyone can quickly work through those problems and get 100% of them correct, they know they can move forward. If much of the class cannot answer them, then they know they need to provide more fundamentals before moving on with harder concepts. If the class all gets stuck on just one problem, they'll know that is something that needs to be reviewed. Without student assessments along the way, instructors have no way to know if they are teaching to the right level for the students, and if the students are following along. If it was just a review for practice, and not meant as an assessment, it wouldn't be a graded assignment.
Also, something I see too much of in this thread, and sometimes elsewhere on PF, are monstrous egos that need to come back down to a more normal size. Perhaps you are the top student in the class, and have learned the material quickly, and much of this is review for you. That doesn't mean everyone else has. It also doesn't mean it is trivial or unimportant or that you should be rude and dismiss the teacher or the need for the assignment just because it comes easily to you. If you find the subject is easy, just be happy with that, get those assignments done quickly, and then spend your time focusing on the ones that don't come as easily. You may think this makes you smarter than the teachers, but I can assure you that they do know more than what they are teaching you, and have their reasons for what they do. Such a negative attitude will only close your mind down rather than open it up to learning. If the class isn't challenging enough, instead of whining over it and wasting your time scribbling insults on your papers, why not seek to make it more challenging for yourself? Read ahead and work ahead, or ask your instructor for some independent readings on the topic that delve into concepts more in depth. There's nothing fun about having a student who would rather mouth off than learn and challenge themself, but it's quite fun and rewarding for a teacher to have a student who craves a challenge and asks the teacher to provide that challenge. So, you can sit back, be lazy, moan and groan and gripe about the subject being boring and easy, or you can take your learning into your own hands and make it interesting by challenging yourself.
