Posted by alexandra_k on January 25, 2014, at 19:13:22
In reply to Re: i got an interview » alexandra_k, posted by Poet on January 24, 2014, at 13:20:58
thanks, guys :)
looks like things are going well for us all so far this year...
my math progress has slowed considerably. or... perhaps that isn't quite fair... it is more that i'm progressing through the problem sets much more slowly now. because they are more demanding. involving more calculations. more concentration.
they are also starting to rely on stuff that i don't feel is being sufficiently explained. starting to think maybe i'm missing stuff...
- getting fractions down to simplest form. mostly i'm fine, but every now and then they throw a doozy where the divisor (need to check that term) is 13. or something silly like that. am i really expected to check every number between 1 and the one in the fraction before concluding it already IS in its simplest form? perhaps so... i guess i can make a few jumps... some numbers i have tests for divisibility... but i don't think they have given us one for 7 yet... and wiki suggests.. that this gets complicated... and we haven't been introduced to primes yet, either... but perhaps we are just supposed to have figured that out from our times tables??
- multiplying fractions. i'm expected to be able to do that all of a sudden (it feels like) and i don't see why or how i'm supposed to know how to do that... unless... i'm supposed to convert them to decimels, do the multiplication, and then convert them back to fractions. perhaps that is how they want me to do that... there must be a simpler way??? converting fractions to decimels is still pretty new... and all that just to calculate the area of a square / rectangle with fractions in the f*ck*ng sides? for reals?
i think i'm getting a much better handle on... how everything pretty much is built up out of times tables. or, well, that's probably not fair... a LOT of math, i mean, really, quite a lot of it, IS built up out of times tables. they are really important for number sense... and for counting generally... starting to see... i never was shown / never managed to grasp that times tables were built up out of skip counting. i never really got that before.
i'm pretty good with them now... but still have a lot of work to do to get better. some of it is... undoing past habits. i remembered the rule with 9's about taking one away then summing to 9... which is a handy check, to be sure, but isn't so helpful as an initial or primary way of coming to an answer. starting to be more conscientious about building 9's out of 6's out of 3's... visualising...
if i think about how far i've come in such a short space of time, i'm fairly amazed. i think i'm going to be okay. i mean... i have a lot of work to do, to be sure, but i think i'm going to be okay.
i see why wittgenstein (the behaviourist who was skeptical about images in the head / visualisation) was regarded as a sh*tty maths teacher. haha. thinking back... i don't think we were really taught much math in primary school... i mean... i remember doing addition sums and multiplication sums on paper... and they would drill us on our times tables (and i learned how to cheat because i simply didn't remember them). but all this other stuff.. puzzles about distances traveled or displacement or whatever... i'm pretty sure i only remember stuff like that coming up on the standardised PAT tests at the end of each year... and you would just kind of... figure it out as best you could. without any feedback on whether you did it right or not. without any instruction on how to do the ones you didn't see how to do (was there such a thing in primary school?)
- scalene triangles bisected at x 2 and reflected... what are the new co-ordinates of the corners?? get me, too. even rotating some of those... i guess... this is how you develop your visuo-spatial skills (however you spell that). is it cheating to draw them on paper?? i don't suppose it is... i suspect such things get easier / faster / more automatic in time...
- elapsed time. i still have issues with clocks... circles, even. degrees etc. partly because... i think this stuff is a bit harder. partly because... it is a lot less familar to me, i guess.
still have around 5 skills from year 5 to finish up. you need to get a block of about 7 in a row correct to get from 90% mastery to 100%. one mistake... and you get shoved back to 80% or 85%... with a bunch more still... I just can't seem to reliably get them...
I figured... Sometimes it is better to go do something else (like make line graphs) for a while... Or go practice my 4x table for speed... Getting there, I am.
Maybe I'll be a theoretical physicist, yet.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1058481
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20140102/msgs/1059508.html