Just for fun (worthless education)

[Lepton]

Since this forum doesn't get used enough, I'm going to post useless details about my education here.

In the 6th grade, I could do over 100 multiplication questions in a minute, so my teacher made me do two sheets instead of one.

My 8th grade math teacher actually taught my entire class some elementary BASIC programming. Then she left and I infected the school's network with a virus.

[HyToFry]

My teachers used think I was cheating when I "did the work in my head". One teacher even went so far as to write up a math problem on the board; I promptly solved it, and he still swore I was cheating.

Some people just don't get it.

[mathgrant]

II leeaarneed hoow too tyypee iin suuch aa waay thaat aall vooweels aaree doouubleed.

[mathgrant]

I learned how to make links.

[OcularGold]

when i was in the third grade, i learned that the reason why we have summer and winter is because sometimes the earth is close to the sun, and sometimes it strays away from the sun.

lept - im really curious as to how you program a virus in basic..


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I've seen water. It's water that's all.

[Evil Empire]

[CzarJ]

Recently, I've become a bit more... restrained, but I used to be a bit insane in math class. For example, year before last in algebra, our teacher was teaching us the basics of exponents, and she wrote (a+b)^10 on the overhead projector and proceeded to explain that it did not equal a^10+b^10. I proceeded to explain to her, after she went back to her desk, that it equaled a^10+a^9b+45a^8b^2+120a^7b^3+210a^6b^4+252a^5b^5+210a^4b^6+120a^3b^7+45a^2b^8+10ab^9+b^10. She just gave me this look like she was terrified of me or something.

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Basket-Weaving For Donuts, Where You Weave Baskets And Get Donuts.

The Doctor Is In. $.05

[HyToFry]

*looks at CJ... terrified*

[Ghost Post]

thats the good thing about the GL, it gets your problem solving brain part working better, so when it comes to some "difficult" maths problem, your the only one in class not stumped, but then you must have cheated because you didnt write it all down!
i hate that, in exams they give 4 marks for working out, only 1 fopr the answer, but get the answers, i can never remember how to do the "correct" working out

[Lepton]

I agree. Things come so easily to me that I don't ever *learn* anything (ie. formulae, proper methods for solving stuff, etc.).

So when I write exams, the answers are there, but it looks kinda gross when I skip over 1/2 a page and write the answer at the bottom.

Anyways, OG. Trusting that you don't write anything like the Empire.Monkey that has currently infested my system, you can make a virus on Visual BASIC by using simple file management commands. Now you have a program that deletes such things as the autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Figure out how to attach it to some other program by yourself, 'cause I'm afraid, there's too many little brains around here.

[OcularGold]

AHh. visual basic is different from BASIC.

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I've seen water. It's water that's all.

[HyToFry]

YEAH!

[Punster]

Giving 4 marks for 'showing your work' and only one for the right answer used to steam me so bad... I had a math teacher than used to stand over me while I wrote tests and when I wrote the answer down without 'using the scrap paper' he'd hit me with a newspaper (before the days this was labelled 'abuse').

I'm teaching my son math now and when the math book says 'divide and check your work', he writes the numbers across the top, looks it over and says "It's right".

Fine by me!

[munira]

Lucky for me, my elementary school had a gifted program, so I didn't have to sit in a regular math class. We all got to work at our own pace, and were encouraged to do the work in our head, and taught the shortcuts. We had pre-tests before each section, then the teacher would assign the sections and problems that we didn't know instead of making us go over things we already knew over and over again. Then when I got into high school, they still had the independent math class for us, where once again we were on our own, to the point where I didn't even have to turn in lessons. I would just tell the teacher when I was ready for the next exam, take it, then work on my own again till I was ready for the next one. But my senior year, I took AP calc (they wouldn't let me take it before then) and all of a sudden I was in a normal classroom setting. The teacher wouldn't let me keep my book open during class and work, even though I was always ahead of what he was teaching, and I had to start showing work. Then I would spend the rest of the class tutoring my friends. When it got to the time to take the AP exam, I was frustrated cause I couldn't complete the last problem. So I took the question to my teacher afterwards and asked him how to do it. He couldn't even get as far as I did with it. Soooo frustrating.

[OcularGold]

I got probably about half of the problems right on the Cal BC AP. i still got a 5 .

heehee!

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I've seen water. It's water that's all.

[Ferris]

I was told off for reading a book which was 'too advanced' at about age 7. We had a system where you had to have read at least one book at each level, but I just ignored that rule and started reading the books which seemed the most interesting.

I also remember having to read "The Day of the Triffids" about eight times, as everyone had to read it in class. Each lesson, we'd all supposedly read one chapter, but I'd usually read about ten chapters. It got really confusing when I appeared to be a chapter behind, but had actually lapped everyone about four times. I even had to be careful not to let on, because the teacher 'caught' me one time and warned me not to skip pages.

*sigh.*

[Ghost Post]

yeah, same happened to me, i'm a fast reader, so teachers accuse me of skipping pages , so then i go and tell them everything thats happened and smile at them, then tey send me to detention for being "insolent"

[Vinny]

Today I learned that Australopithecus is an extinct genus of bipedal primates (hominids), living in Africa about 4.4 millions years ago. And that there are two types: gracile and robust, with us modern human being the descedents of the gracile group.

[Hitchhiker]

I always knew I wasn't robust.

[Vinny]

You, my dear Hitchhiker, is muy muy gracile

[Beartalon]

I recall being in Grade 12 doing advanced math trigonometry (pre-calc) and we were given a homework assignment. For twenty questions, we were to draw the unit circle for each question, solve the question and show the labelled points on the circles.

After doing our regular class exercises, I did it all in the last 20 minutes of class without opening my book, and without drawing the circles or turning around to use the chart in the back of the room. The solutions were all there.

I only got 76% because I didn't follow directions, but I got the answers right. He finally gave me the 100% after he randomly picked three questions and I drew the circles with the points again without looking at a reference.
--

Once in English class I was given a detention by a teacher who didn't know a word I used. She asked what happened to the hero of a book we had read. I read directly from the page: "The man was castigated by his peers." She thought I was trying to be crude since she thought she'd heard "castrated". "Castigated" wasn't in her cheap dollar-store dictionary so she sent me to detention. I was only there a few minutes before being sent home, and the principal had reprimanded her for not having the official dictionary on her desk. What made no sense to me was if the answer to the question was "castigated" and she didn't know what the word meant, what was her answer?
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In my first year university calculus course, I was sick for one class and never really got the hang of minimum/maximum extrema problems. The professor was a part-time teacher with no office hours and I was too shy then to ask for help from other students. When I wrote my final exam which was the only mark that meant anything, I tried the minimum/maximum extrema problem, worth 20%. I gave up and erased it. I did 80% of the exam, and got 80% in the course.

[EEEM]

Today in Bio we were talking about the process of muscle contraction from stimulus down to when the muscle contracts and relaxes. Maggie had the brilliant idea for each person in our class to take the identity of cells and other compounds that were associated in the process and actually act out what happens. It was hilarious. We only have 6 people in our class, so we spread out across the lab and ran back and forth as ATP and such. In the end someone made a crack about how they were Actin (Acting)... but they were actually Actin. As in actin and myosin...

Yes, I'm a biology nerd. I love that class.

[Beartalon]

We did that running back and forth bit in a database administration class in our last semester of college to see the process of how a query runs through an Oracle SQL database.

Those of us who played the parts got the question right on the exam, but almost all of our scratch notes to answer the question included the list of student actors FIRST, and then the names of their parts. It was a weird effect, as we had all imagined the scene in the room and who did what before we could match them up properly with the real situation.

[Ghost Post]

I always have problems with English teachers. They always refuse to specify a length for papers, so I just write a paragraph or so. And then they always hand it back and say something like "Write more" without having read it. WTF? (actually, one teacher took in stride, gave me an a, and always specified a length for papers after that)

[EEEM]

I dislike it when teachers grade essays arbitrarily. The just smack a grade up top without putting any notes or marks or corrections or anything. I dislike that. If I do poorly, I want to know why!

[Dread Pirate Westley]

*Takes over one of the fora from EEEM*

Originally posted by CJ, a long time ago:

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a^10+a^9b+45a^8b^2+120a^7b^3+210a^6b^4+252a^5b^5+210a^4b^6+120a^3b^7+45a^2b^8+10ab^9+b^10

---

Shouldn't that be a^10+10a^9b+45a^8b^2+120a^7b^3+210a^6b^4+252a^5b^5+210a^4b^6+120a^3b^7+45a^2b^8+10ab^9+b^10?

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There are 10 kinds of people. Those who understand binary and those who can't count.

[Beartalon]

DPW: No

The pattern of coefficients goes like this for powers of a+b, where each coefficient for the ab combinations is the sum of the one above it and above it to the left

code:

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(a+b)0 : 1


(a+b)1 : 1  1


(a+b)2 : 1  2  1


(a+b)3 : 1  3  3   1


(a+b)4 : 1  4  6   4   1


(a+b)5 : 1  5 10  10   5   1


(a+b)6 : 1  6 15  20  15   6   1


(a+b)7 : 1  7 21  35  35  21   7   1


(a+b)8 : 1  8 28  56  70  56  28   8  1


(a+b)9 : 1  9 36  84 126 126  84  36  9  1


(a+b)10: 1 10 45 120 210 252 210 120 45 10 1

---

[One Skunk Todd]

My eighth grade science teacher insisted that light traveled from the sun to the earth "nearly instantaneously". When I tried to explain that it took ~eight minutes she got very flustered and told me to sit down and be quiet.

[Dread Pirate Westley]

Yes, mine matches yours exactly. CJ's, on the other hand, does not have the coefficient for the a^9*b term. Thank you.

[mikegoo]

You could also have gotten the coefficients using combinations and not drawn out pascal's triangle:
10 C 0, 10 C 1, 10 C 2,...,10 C 10.

I learned from one of my students today that 5(8x + 9) expanded is 58x + 9. I've decided to teach the distributive property this way from now on as it seems much easier.

I apologize for all of the bad teachers there are. I also apologize for all the corrupt politicians, incompetent managers, lazy teenagers, disgruntled postal workers, and ugly strippers. Not everyone is good at their job.

[Ghost Post]

[Macros]

even why toast lands butterside down?

[Beartalon]

DPW - silly me, I was looking at CzarJ's original when replying to you. Sorry!

[Antrax]

I used to ask to be excused from classes at the beginning of the year in junior high, and if refused, I'd just piss the teacher off until she preferred letting me out over having me stay in class. One of my favourites was Biology in the 8th grade:
Teacher: Today we're going to learn about Nucleic acids (apologizing for misspellings in advance, I have no idea how to spell most of the scientific words in English, because they don't come up often in everyday conversations, so I had nowehere to learn from). There are four of them.
Antrax: Five.
Teacher: I beg your pardon?
Antrax: There are five nucleic acids.
Teacher: No, there are four.
Antrax: No, there are five: Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine, Uracil.
Teacher: What?
Antrax: You forgot Uracil.
Teacher: There's no such thing as Uracil, don't talk back to me.
Antrax: Oh, there isn't? What do they think they make RNA of? Paste?
Teacher(stares again at book that only has ACGT mentioned): go to the principal's office.
Of course, I'm a little less proud of it nowadays, but I remember being very smug about it back then
Antrax

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"If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love." -Victor Mancini, "Choke"

[This message has been edited by Antrax (edited 09-30-2002 09:18 AM).]

[Bicho the Inhaler]

Poor uracil...always the underdog

Nice spelling job, by the way...

[VinnyQ]

I overheard a phrase from a conversation last week at a coffee shop that I must share with you guys. These girls were twentyish, I think, and they were discussing romances and the such, and at one point in the conversation, a girl actually said "You can't have Romance without Finance."

Now how do you like that!?!

[CrystyB]

well next time use a value that isn't so nice and small. Or i assumed the x being 2 (to check the new distributivity law ) w/o any basis?

[Aarondalf]

What is this, the "Stroke your own ego" thread?

I still have trouble remebering that 2*3=5, not 6.

[edit]I got the 5 and 6 around the wrong way again...LOL[/edit]
=^_^=

[This message has been edited by Aarondalf (edited 10-13-2002 09:07 AM).]

[VinnyQ]

No aaron, this isn't. Go stroke somewhere else.