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cranky today
Jan. 28th, 2006 10:48 amDon't know why, I just am.
Today's the 20th anniversary of the shuttle Challenger disaster. I will probably always remember sitting in Physics class as a sr. in high school when my teacher came in & said, "The shuttle blew up." And I thought he said, "the shuttle went up." I was like, "Yeah, so, shuttles go up all the time." Then he brought out a tv where they were replaying that tape.
hmmm. When Columbia disintegrated just under 3 years ago, I also misinterpreted what someone had said to me originally. They said something like, "Columbia is breaking up over Texas." And I thought they meant the country of Colombia. I couldn't figure out what Colombians were doing in TX, or why they were so upset about it, or something like that.
That's quite a coincidence that had never occurred to me before.
On another note, I mentioned to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kitchenwitch that I spent about 15 minutes last week trying to remember what the quadratic equation was. I remember being very curious about what it was before I knew what it was; and I remember understanding it; and I could almost remember what it looked like. But I couldn't remember exactly what it looked like (and it turns out that I was remembering the quadratic formula, not the quadratic equation) and I had no idea anymore of its function. I just looked it up in Wikipedia, and it has struck me full force how very far away I am now from understanding, um, complex math. Although as I recall, I learned this in Trigonometry-Pre-Calc, which on the scale of big math, is probably not that complex at all. I guess I've had this thought for nearly 20 years that it would be fun to take an algebra class, but I would probably have to take really basic algebra, considering that I don't really understand some of the things that the Wikipedia article is talking about. No, that doesn't mean I'm bad at math,1 it just means I haven't done it extensively for close to 20 years. Ok?
That sr. year in high school was kind of nice, in that I was taking both physics and trig/pre-calc, and there was this certain symmetry to it, because all the math seemed to go together v.nicely. We were using trig equations in a lot of the physics problems (although not vice versa). I think there was even a few days there, near the end of that year, where I just started to get the cusp of calculus, although of course we really didn't get into it much at all. But I do remember thinking that calculus, which had been this big, huge thing that was so hard, suddenly didn't seem that insurmountable. I certainly always liked math, and even toyed w/the idea of studying it in college, but I realized, just as I realized about me and music, that I didn't have the talent to be truly extraordinary. Seeing others, or hearing about their experiences over the years, I can see now that I would have drowned immediately, if I'd even made it that far.
1That was just something my middle sister told me when I saw her. Apparently this still bugs me. Although in no way am Ilivsmama in the math aptitude. Not when my nearest approaches to math recently are adding & subtracting in my checkbook; or using math occasionally (and esp. geometry) when I've worked on stained glass.
Today's the 20th anniversary of the shuttle Challenger disaster. I will probably always remember sitting in Physics class as a sr. in high school when my teacher came in & said, "The shuttle blew up." And I thought he said, "the shuttle went up." I was like, "Yeah, so, shuttles go up all the time." Then he brought out a tv where they were replaying that tape.
hmmm. When Columbia disintegrated just under 3 years ago, I also misinterpreted what someone had said to me originally. They said something like, "Columbia is breaking up over Texas." And I thought they meant the country of Colombia. I couldn't figure out what Colombians were doing in TX, or why they were so upset about it, or something like that.
That's quite a coincidence that had never occurred to me before.
On another note, I mentioned to
kitchenwitch that I spent about 15 minutes last week trying to remember what the quadratic equation was. I remember being very curious about what it was before I knew what it was; and I remember understanding it; and I could almost remember what it looked like. But I couldn't remember exactly what it looked like (and it turns out that I was remembering the quadratic formula, not the quadratic equation) and I had no idea anymore of its function. I just looked it up in Wikipedia, and it has struck me full force how very far away I am now from understanding, um, complex math. Although as I recall, I learned this in Trigonometry-Pre-Calc, which on the scale of big math, is probably not that complex at all. I guess I've had this thought for nearly 20 years that it would be fun to take an algebra class, but I would probably have to take really basic algebra, considering that I don't really understand some of the things that the Wikipedia article is talking about. No, that doesn't mean I'm bad at math,1 it just means I haven't done it extensively for close to 20 years. Ok? That sr. year in high school was kind of nice, in that I was taking both physics and trig/pre-calc, and there was this certain symmetry to it, because all the math seemed to go together v.nicely. We were using trig equations in a lot of the physics problems (although not vice versa). I think there was even a few days there, near the end of that year, where I just started to get the cusp of calculus, although of course we really didn't get into it much at all. But I do remember thinking that calculus, which had been this big, huge thing that was so hard, suddenly didn't seem that insurmountable. I certainly always liked math, and even toyed w/the idea of studying it in college, but I realized, just as I realized about me and music, that I didn't have the talent to be truly extraordinary. Seeing others, or hearing about their experiences over the years, I can see now that I would have drowned immediately, if I'd even made it that far.
1That was just something my middle sister told me when I saw her. Apparently this still bugs me. Although in no way am I
livsmama in the math aptitude. Not when my nearest approaches to math recently are adding & subtracting in my checkbook; or using math occasionally (and esp. geometry) when I've worked on stained glass.
