Ever take the GRE's? Or even worse, the
Miller's Analogies? Both tests saw off the top of your skull, pull
your brain out and squeeze it like a sponge, then return it. I took
the GRE's a long time ago when I was thinking about getting a CAGS
degree after I was out of RIC for a couple of years. Good thing I
didn't as talk therapy was about to be destroyed by the
Pharmaceutical industry by providing pills for every malady. This
would make life more profitable for health insurance companies, who
hated the idea of financing years long, weekly sessions costing them
ever more and more.
The GRE's, then, were in three parts,
language, mathematical and logical reasoning. How did I do? I am
proud to say I scored a standard deviation and some ABOVE everyone
else on the language part, the mean on math and I was shocked to see
I did horribly on the logical reasoning with a standard deviation
below. I wasn't happy about that. I was weak in that section but
didn't know how weak. The language part was easy for me. That's my
gift, talent I guess. I can still read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in
the original Middle English. I can't do math in my head though, I
need pencil and paper or a calculator and I'll get to that in a
minute. Here's something cool. English wasn't the English you and I
speak today.
Whan that aprill with his
shoures soote When April's gentle rains have pierced
the drought
The droghte of march hath perced of March right to the root, and bathed each sprout
to
the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour through every vein with liquid of such power
Of which vertu engendred is the flour; it brings forth the engendering of the flower;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete When Zephyrus too with his sweet breath has blown
breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth Through every field and forest, urging on
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne the tender shoots, and then there's a youthful sun
Hath in the ram his halve cours
yronne, His second half course through the Ram now run
And smale foweles maken melodye, and little birds make melody.
That's how they spoke back then. It
sounded like this: “The droughty of March hath pierce-ed to the
rooty. And bath-ed every veiny in sweech licore.”
Anyways...I did well with languages.
Math on the other hand I sucked at or at least barely manage to pass
throughout my school career. The reason? Shitty math teachers. I sat
down one time and compared my grades to the teachers I liked vs. the
ones I hated. The ones I liked I did fairly well, the ones I hated?
Awful. There were more awful than liked.
I hope things have changed. My
experience with math teachers was that they were the shortest
tempered, impatient and cruelest beings on the Earth. I can point to
ONLY two math types I have met that were completely perfect.
I can remember this in second grade
from our teacher who shouted, “You got it WRONG!!”
That was followed by having to back up and and redo the problem as
she/he would find out that you didn't know the procedure to find
parts A and B which got you to C. Then there was more complaining
from the teacher.
The WORST teacher in math I had and
I'll name him here, Richard Pascucci, was a piece of work. In Saint
Ray's many of us had to take him for geometry, B level (college prep)
with it's geometrical proofs. Seeing this again makes me hug my math
PTSD even tighter.
Pretty much every Friday we'd have a
test on the week's past work. On the following Monday we'd get the
tests back and he'd go over each problem on how to solve it.
I remember this distinctly one Monday
morning. It was first period and we were all sitting there waiting
for Pascucci to arrive.
“What do you think he'll bitch about
today?” asked one of us.
I say: “Oh, he'll come in, blow half
the class telling us all what idiots we are for failing Friday's
test.”
Some others of the class turned towards
me with that knowing look in their faces.
Soon arrives Pascucci. He walks in,
drops a bundle of papers on his desk with a THUMP. Those were the
corrected tests and then says:
“I spent A WHOLE WEEK trying to
explain to you how to do this! What more can I do? Over HALF of you
FAILED the test!! What is it? Are you even AWAKE? HUH?” Pascucci
didn't even bother to hide his disgust for us.
He then tries out a new teaching
resource, colored chalk.
We go through each question and with
various colors, he spells out the logic behind these proofs and how
to conclude them. The chalk didn't help matters at all as I found out
from several others. As we filed out into the hallway after the bell
rang, someone behind me chirps up; “Duhhhh, we 'tards can now
better understand this with the pretty colors!”
Pascucci should have never been a
teacher or perhaps he was the worst example of a typical math teacher
of the time. Either way, I hated his guts.
Years later, I had to take a required
statistics course for my major in psychology. All science, including
social sciences, are really math in the end. I was to learn about
correlation coefficients, Spearman Rho's, regression analysis and
degrees of freedom. I knew I was going to pass with barely a C- in
this course and that would mean struggling to attain that.
But, what luck. It was taught by Earl
Simpson. This guy could explain Einstein to a 10 year old and make
it reasonable. I sat there, understanding without too much
difficulty, every concept behind statistics, the formulas and how to
design tests. I came away from that course with a new idea. Perhaps
I didn't organically suck at math? Perhaps if I had the right
teachers it would've made the difference. Why was it that I could
grasp some of the middling to higher ideas of statistics when just a
few short years earlier, I thought I was borderline DUH when it came
to math? By the end of Simpson's course, we were into number theory
and using the then new fractal geometry to design psych tests. I “got
it” without that much trauma.
**
Want to torture yourself for a bit?
Here's a link to a Miller's Analogies test. You know the set up.
Dog is to cat as night is to......
But watch out...it gets viscous as you
go further on.
No comments:
Post a Comment