I know this would be like the least popular event in the history of EVAH, but I kind of wish we could have a little "Math - WAY more fun than you remember" thing at a F2F sometime. We could play games, do logic puzzles, get all excited and enthusiastic over number theory and imaginary numbers, and generally try to reverse some childhood trauma.

Oh, and also, your brain can totally handle the math. Whether you get a teacher who opens the right door for your brain to go through is the problem. Er, I think. I mean, maybe you have dyscalculia and your brain literally can't handle the math and I'm being all insensitive and "all you need is some gumption, dagnabbit" about it, but as far as your intelligence goes, you see, you can totally..

As a teacher who wishes she could do a better job with teaching maths (and wasn't daunted by the prospect of teaching maths to the big kids) I would totally go to that. In the AU where I got to attend a F2F ever again.

I'm pretty sure one of my kids has discalculia, and it leaves me just baffled as to how to best help her. I mean, kinaesthetic stuff is all well and good, but I need her to be able to make that intuitive leap that 30 plus 6 will be 36 because you can bloody hear it and see it in the numbers rather than feeling desperate and baffled and trying to count to figure it out. Gah. Poor kid has no grasp of abstract number, and no sense of whether she should be counting forwards, backwards, up or down - hundred squares just make things more complicated for her, because she has no sense of direction or sequencing.

(DJ)

::brain go splodey with math talk::

I managed to graduate high school and college without taking a single chemistry class. Um, yay?

I'd pretty much like to take every humanities course out there. I'd also like to redo all of undergrad knowing what I know now. Man did I not know how good I had it back then.

In whiny news, I came home early and am feeling rotten again. This cold can go away any time now.

I'd like to retake my poetry workshop classes from undergrad. Loved those and they forced me to write regularly.

and my teachers said, "Just go with it, will you?"

Argh. I've heard way too many people with similar stories.

I was getting so frustrated with one of my students today. I was working with him on solids of revolution -- things where you're given some lines and curves to outline a shape, and then you take that shape and revolve it around an axis, so that you get a sort of donut-shaped thing where the cross-sections are the original shape. (This isn't working so well to explain in words. I need pictures.) He wouldn't draw anything. Wanted to do it all with equations, with no graphs or pictures at all. This is nearly impossible to do without visualizing it, and he seemed to refuse to visualize it, too -- he wanted to do the entire thing just by manipulating the equations.

We ended up practically having a standoff, where I told him that I would not help him with a particular problem until he drew the damn picture, and he kept asking me things like, "But should I subtract x from 4, or 4 from x?" and I'd reply, "Draw the picture, look at it, and tell me." Every question he asked, the answer would have been obvious with a picture to look at, and I told him so, and it still took me five minutes to convince him to draw it.

As for classes I'd take, there was a French in Louisiana sequence at Tulane that I always wanted to take but never got a chance to. The first semester was a lecture class on the different dialects of French in Louisiana and their history and how they differ from each other and from standard French and so on. Then the second semester was a field research class, where you'd go to visit native speakers of the various dialects and record them and then analyze how they used the language.

I also kind of want to take Chemistry. I didn't take it in college, because I did badly in it in high school, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do it. That's the only class I've ever avoided because I thought I might not be able to understand the material, and it's bothered me since.

As for classes I'd take, there was a French in Louisiana sequence at Tulane

Oh, that sounds wicked cool, Hil.

I would enthusiastically be a TA for a "Math with the Buffistas" seminar with Hil and Emily. Except that between the foaminess of the profs and the foaminess of the students, I fear I'd be highly distracted.

Most folks who know me know how much I love math. But you have to admit, that's a lot of foamy.

I utterly wussed out of the math requirement in college, taking the bonehead algebra course. I did the final in 5 minutes--and STILL didn't get the idea that "Hey, Connie! You can do math!" It wasn't until I was in my last semester and taking the stats and logic classes I'd been avoiding when it dawned on me: "I have a logical brain that can handle this stuff. I didn't have to wuss out on the science and engineering."

God, stats. I could never figure out *why* the t-square and charts and stuff worked, and it made me all kinds of anxious, but the logical reasoning behind question construction and the rest was so obvious. I looked around at my classmates and saw them looking baffled, and I actually wondered if they were pretending so they could preserve the legend of The Stats Class from Hell.

I suspect that if I were a boy I'd be an engineer now. But I caught the tailend of "girls don't do math. Wouldn't you rather be a teacher?"

My sister is 44, and she just missed that "girls don't do math" thing. However, she did get lots of presumptions from others, both in school and afterward. Her name is Kristine, which she always had shortened to Kris growing up. However, since at the time, that was more typically a boy's spelling, it would be assumed that she was male. She started using the full name, which is all she goes by now. (Her husband gets confused when I call asking for "Kris".)

She also got quite a bit of sexual harassment from some of her engineering profs, although her employers weren't as bad, not even at Northrup Grumman, her first job out of school. She worked in the military aviation division and was one of the few women in the whole department, but most of the guys viewed her as their younger sister and were very protective of her.