Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Beardsley
Incidentally, I recently met a woman called Jo who teaches geology online.
Quite a few of her students are from Other Cultures, and do not approve
of women teaching; but they also don't realise that Jo is a woman's name,
so she doesn't bother to tell them.
|
Ow. My guess is that that prejudice only applies above primary school
level, and is even reversed for primary teachers. Ow.
My personal math history: I did fine in 10th-grade geometry. On one
homework problem the teacher said I was the only person in his three
classes (possibly 90 kids) who got the right answer. It was a very
pretty 3-D construction, but nothing I'd consider difficult. I'd have
done better in the class if I had copied all the propositions and
theorems from the textbook into my notebook as I was supposed to
do, so that I could refer to them during tests, but my perfectionism
made it too much work, so I fell behind. I did badly in 11th-grade
intermediate algebra (I hadn't the slightest inkling what to
do with
a polynomial), and failed advanced math (pre-calculus, I guess it was)
in the first semester. First day, really. If we had started on page 1
of the textbook I might have had a fighting chance. We started on
page 12.
Polynomials. The teacher did nothing but transcribe
the book to the blackboard. I don't know where the other kids in that
class came from. They were like they had been imported from some
planet where everyone learns everything the first time through and
nobody ever asks any questions, and they were all going to Harvard
and Yale and across the ocean to Oxford the next year.
I later took intermediate algebra again twice more, but was never
able to grasp what to do with a polynomial. To replace the advanced
math class I failed out of, I took a one-semester speech class.
Eighteen kids, the teacher was about 75 years old with a permanent
smile like Ed Wynn's, and we each gave 20 speeches during the
semester! Louis Claeson gave almost all of mine A+, except for a
few where I was really unprepared, and got an A.
Nobody told me that I needed the credit from the speech class to
graduate. The summer before I took classes at the Children's Theater,
and found out later that I got credit for them, and that if I hadn't I
would have had to take an additional class. Everyone needs guidence.
I barely got any, and for me it really wasn't enough.
-- Jeff, in Minneapolis