The professor was, honestly, a little scary at first...she made it very clear what her expectations were without ever spelling it out to us (never acknowledging someone speaking out, always asking for a quiet hand to answer a question, staring people down) but she quickly won the class over with her amazing flair...and all around math!
Math was always a subject I thought I really rocked in school (until Calculus II in college). But I'd come to realize that what I was really good at was memorizing tricks (carry the one, punch numbers in a T1 graphing calculator).
Conceptualization. That's what I've been missing. My professor started the class with the difficult concept of understanding magnitude. What does a million feel like, a billion, a trillion, 10 trillion (like our national deficit....it turns out, if we were to pay $1 ever second, it'd take us over 30,000 years to get out of debt).
I am completely psyched to relearn all this math. Nerd alert! But seriously....I am psyched.
Brainbuster: One activity we did (and stop reading if you're not that interested in math) that I still have trouble with had to do with fractions. The professor wrote (1/2) / (3/4). What does that look conceptually? (no clue). Here is my version of what she drew on the board:
So essentially, how many three-fourths can you get out of one-half? If you cut the whole piece into four, you can only get 2 pieces out of the 3 you'd want to make 3/4 (shown in blue), so the answer is 2/3. I have no idea if this will make sense to someone just reading it, but this whole thing blew my mind because I'd never seen this type of problem drawn out for me. I tried other harder fraction problems and my head hurt (plus I didn't activate my brain buttons beforehand).I could go on and on, but it's now time for my post-dinner walk. If you're digging this math stuff as much as I am...
...call me!
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