Why I didn't major in math

Speaking of questionable math ... I was grading papers for the teacher during my teacher-ed classroom observation hour time, and the ninth-graders had to do some questions about endangered species. One question asked, "If there is a population of 250 whooping cranes left, do you think that is enough?" My favorite answer was: "Yes, because if each of the cranes has one baby, then there will be 500 cranes soon!" Those are going to be some confused male cranes.

Another student talked about how the cranes were displaced when the European settlers arrived 2000 years ago. =(

Clearly you have a class filled with gay-advocating Norsists.

See also:
http://eatliver.com/i.php?n=864
(warning, ethnic joke).

I just graded an algebra exam this past week that was taken by 23 students, of whom only 5 passed. Was it a tricky subject? Not especially: lines and slopes. Worst class ever. I have to figure out what's going on.

More here.

Once, when I was taking "physics of the atom", and failing miserably, I was taking a test which asked me to do (what for me was) the impossible.

I wrote "I can't do that, but I can draw a badass Lamborghini." And so I did.

My grade on the test was a four. Out of a hundred. Man that sucked. Nobody did well in that class. The professer wasn't really very good at explaining things. I think he knew it all too well, and couldn't remember anymore what it was like not to know it all so well.

I'd have given you at least 5 points for the Lambo. ;-)

Way back when I was taking Fortran one entire class (out of four) failed the midterm. The entire class. The instructor was fired. I heard cheering from the sysop's office.

I empathize with this test taker. I once had a professor in American Literature whose class and lectures consisted of him reading the assigned novels to us in a monotone, an occasional question, and a midterm and a final. On the midterm everyone got a B, and the final exam consisted of analyzing two short stories which were on the syllabus but which were never mentioned in class. I had not read them. I looked at that essay form for 15 minutes and then I got up, threw my paper in the trash, and left the room. As I left the building I heard the sounds of other pathetic students shuffling out behind me. The feeling of utter failure sucks.

I had a physics exam question that came very close to looking like that once ... Classical E&M class, the question asked: "Given an infinitely long solenoid with radius r carrying current I, and which is crossed perpendicularly through its center all along its length by straight wires carrying current J, each wire separated from its neighbor by distance L; what is the force per unit length exerted on the current of the solenoid by the magnetic field of the wires?"

I was on my second sheet of scratch paper working through the hairy integrals for that, when the twin thoughts finally passed through my head: "Boy, this would sure be an easy problem if it was asking the force on the current in the wires from the magnetic field of the solenoid," and "Who the #*()^ would put a Newton's Third Law question on an E&M exam?" I probably would have drawn the hanging man on the sheet anyway, if I'd thought of it, just for the time I'd wasted ... (For the non-physicists in the room, since 'every action has an equal and opposite reaction', the hard calculus question that was asked and the easy arithmetic question that wasn't necessarily have equal and opposite answers. So you just do the easy arithmetic problem, then put a minus sign in front of it -- or don't, since we were just calculating magnitude.)

wrote "I can't do that, but I can draw a badass Lamborghini." And so I did.

Please, SteveC, if you still have that badass picture, or can still reproduce such awesomeness, please, please post it on the web so we may admire.

That is hysterical. It is also why I didn't major in math.

One of my math teachers told us he majored in math so he would never have to write papers. I told him I could write a history of calculus quicker than he could solve half of these things. I mean, really, if you have to erase the blackboard more than three times in the course of solving one problem...you picked the wrong problem.

I have just gotten through grading a set of planetary science homework assignments. In the first week of class, I pointed out how important it was to think about the numbers you are using. If you get a planet with a mass of 2 kg, you know something is badly wrong. Naturally, they all laughed and assumed that they would never do that.

Now that they are doing the homework however, they are failing to read the table properly and assuming that when the mass says "2" it means 2 kg and not 2 Earth masses (as it is labeled). Then they go ahead and finish the calculation and assure me that their answer makes sense.

Often, the key to doing the math (especially in science and engineering) is not the math itself, but understanding what the numbers actually mean.

Been there, done that...

I'm now in a Maths and Stats department. I've discovered that the great thing about doing research is that when you reach this point, you can just wander off, have a cup of coffee and then come back and just throw everything in the bin and work on something simpler. Like drawing Lamborghinis.

Bob

Years ago I took a Ph.D. qualifying exam in real analysis and discovered to my horror that I had studied the wrong material. The professor in charge had not updated the official syllabus in the grad office. He assumed that everyone taking the exam would have been in his recent real analysis course (I had taken it earlier with someone else), so he didn't worry about the fact that it was his predecessor's syllabus that was still on file. I wasn't the only one he screwed up, although I did manage to squeeze out a passing score. (In fact, I think his own students failed the qual exam.)

Yeah, I remember the initial shock and my mind going blank for several seconds. Damn.

I still remember my very first college math class. I figured, hey, I'm smart, I can start with honors. This is at Berkeley, so I got this guy: http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/

Failing his own students wasn't even the issue. I later found out that our first midterm was an exact copy of an exam from the doctoral version of our class. He then made the two TAs take our final. Mine passed; the other failed. This was a doctoral candidate, failing a soph math course. Heck, half of the sixty actual students failed. It is my proudest B- ever.

Kahan, who was a fabulous lecturer, just a terrible teacher, wasn't even my high point for terrifying exams at Cal. My quantum mechanics prof did that: his first exam was 12 points, with a mean of 11 -- the few who mucked up a sign got a C. His second exam was of 43 points, with a mean of 6. He let his TA write his final. I liked his TA.

I've had some painful math tests, although I've been lucky in my draw of math profs. The most painful test I took was actually in a modern European history course. The professor claimed that the test would be simple: he'd give us five terms, and we'd have to identify each one, place it in its "historical context," and identify roughly the time period for which it was relevant. Sounded simple, right?

I tied for highest grade in the class with a 75%, after I argued my way up during office hours from a 70. The median grade was a 14.

Oddly, that was a somewhat relevatory experience. After getting the results, I had a definite "aha!" moment in which I came to the conclusion that the professor thought he was being eminently fair (and, honestly, he was) - he was just a nitpicky bastard. I prepared for the subsequent exam accordingly and got a 95. (On my exam, he wrote "Ad astra per asperem", which I remember thinking was both appropraite and pretentious at the time.)

One day near the end of the semester, I was sitting with my then-girlfriend at the pond on campus, enjoying the sunny day, when we realized that our Biology 102 final was happening right at that moment. We jumped up, raced to class, and breathlessly grabbed a test. I sat down, huffing and puffing, scared as hell, and looked at the first question...

"1. You are sitting at the duck pond and suddenly realize that you are late for your Biology 102 final. Describe how the sudden burst of adrenaline effects your body."

I majored in math. I don't quite get the joke.

I also don't have exam dreams. At the end of one quarter, I had the idea that I had finals in calculus and computer science the same day, and wondered how I was going to handle that. The day before, I was on campus buying stationery supplies and chanced upon a schedule and realized that I'd already missed the CompSci exam. Panic?

I took the class on a Pass/No Pass basis; most of my programs ran, so I passed. As it happens, I wound up making a living writing short programs for small machines.

I once had a statistics exam where I couldn't even understand the damn questions. None of them. Depressing.

Regarding being proud of grades - until recently in Denmark, we had the following grades 00,03,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,13 - where everything below 6 is failed.
Once I went to an exam in Macro-economics (this was back when I studied at Business College), and got a 8 (somewhat equivalent to a C). Given the fact that over 200 people went to that exam, that only six of us passed, and that I got the second highest grade, I'm pretty proud of that 8. Something I wouldn't normally be.

I taught 5 semesters of Elementary Algebra and of Intermediate Algebra as Adjunct Prof at Woodbury University.

Because Woodbury gives MBAs I allowed Business Majors half credit for executive summary essay answers if they couldn't handle the equations. Becuase they give Masters of Archiecture, and bachelors in Fashion Design, Graphics Art, and Animation, I gave half-credit for "drawing the right picture."

Quite often I'd get a drawing, for instance, Homer Simpson saying "D'Oh!" and a thought ballooon which, with the right sub-picture, got half credit.

The best executive summary essay answer I ever got was for a question which began:

"How would you use a programmable calculator to solve this problem...?"

The answer I was given went:

"I'd find someone who took this course before, and I'd say 'Dude, I'll give you this programmable calculator if you tell me the answer to this algebra problem...'"

I wrote "100% credit -- Management Material!"

Cute.... Remembering my college math classes, if your equations explode like that (before the inkblot ;-) ) on an exam question, you're almost certainly on the wrong track. Probably true in real-life too, but with real problems there may not be a "right track" that makes it simple. To me, that just makes the student's macabre joke funnier.

Your budding middle manager must have heard of the barometer problem, often attributed to a young Niels Bohr.

Rasputin: ...if you have to erase the blackboard more than three times in the course of solving one problem...

Are you kidding? THREE boards? What about three (or more) entire class periods spent proving one theorem? I've had several of those. The good profs would write a summary of the steps of the proof at the beginning, note the ones we'd already done, and what we had left to do.

Your budding middle manager must have heard of the barometer problem, often attributed to a young Niels Bohr.

Funny thing is, I have never heard it attributed to Bohr in Denmark.

Some of the integrals in the problems in Griffiths' popular text, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, required about four letter-sized pages of working. At the end of all that one would discover that one had not gotten the right answer, and the ensuing hour would be spent searching in vain for one sign mistake in four pages of scrawl.

Coincidentally or not, that was about the time when I started gravitating away from physics and towards philosophy.

Ack! Computational math, where you need to get a numerical answer out the other end! Man, I so much prefer discrete math. Still, the hardest CS exam I ever took was in Computability and Automata, and I was on the committee that wrote the thing! (It was a senior-level undergrad class.)

Re: Jonathan vos Post above - not all MBA students are math doofuses, although I will say that about a third of my class (at the University of Rochester, which has a solid program) had difficulties with Econometrics. And there was none of that "Executive Summary" BS. That would not have been tolerated by either the students or the faculty.

Larry B.,

I partly respect MBA students, of whom you are correct that not all are doofi. I also served on the Academic Honesty committee, and a disproprortionate fraction of those charged with Plagiarism were MBA students who insisted that they'd done nothing wrong, as this was standard corporate practice.

I'd point out that I'd been plagiarized in the corporate world, but that they agreed to follow the rules of this University, which were not those of a Fortune 500 firm.

I have ghostwritten 2 MBA dissertations for Fortune 100 executives for cash. They both "earned" MBA with Honors from top B-schools. Hence I have a clue what MBA students do.

After all my years in corporate "reality" and in Management for gigabuck firms, and as a Board member in small firms, I finally went beyond MBA level into Mathematical Economics, where I have a number of refreed publications with Professor Philip Fellman, Southern New Hampshire University. I thus have more respect for DBAs then MBAs, and have given Doctoral Seminars to DBA candidates.

Bottom line: Barbie said "Math is hard; let's go shopping." But to do the shopping for a megacorporation, Math is necessary. And some of the Math in business is really cool, starting with Satisficing and Black-Scholes, but going into the origins of clustered volatility in the Sante Fe model (I predict Doyne Farmer will share an Economics "Nobel prize"), and applying Stuart Kauffman's 6N-dimensional statistical mechanics to competition theory and the evolution of intellectual property.

I asked for drawings or "Executive Summary" on exams for this reason: not no make life easy for the students, or inflate their grades, but so I could use the exam to eamine what the HECK was going on in their minds. My strength as a teacher was that I could usually figure out what they were thinking that was wrong, and do the hard work of unteaching them the wrong model before teaching them a right model, and working from their strengths -- visual, narrative, kinesthetic, organizational.

Yes, it can be much harder to write an exam than take one. But grading is mere mechanics unless there is something to grade, which shows the gears grinding in their heads.

I was lucky enough to have a high school teacher that thought the Spanish Armada met its fate by getting frozen in ice. She taught English, though, and was a little better at that.

In college, on a statistics test we had to draw a trend and then describe the (if I remember correctly) three components of a trend. I could only remember two, so I decided the third was "the Elvis component" and drew a little Elvis on the trendline.

I got credit.

I think the graduate assistant must have been tired.

As an undergrad (late 70's) I used to get exam nightmares. Usually, it went that I'd gone home to parents' place for the summer, then realized that I was at that very moment supposed to be 300km away writing one more exam. The dreams faded away within a year or so of graduation. Fast-forward 15 years, and I'm in a Master's program -- and sure enough, I start having exam nightmares....

Hmm. Perhaps I won't pursue formal higher ed, once I retire after all. I'm not sure I could stand it, at that age.

dkary: Part of the problem seems to be that so many high school books are really piss-poor at explaining units. The calling of electric current "amperage" and the like doesn't help much.

Hardest exam I have ever done was the exam for the file systems course I did in my last year of undergrad. It didn't help that there was no graded practice for the sorts of problems that would appear on it. At least when I did computer architecture (later on, in my case) we'd had some practice with that. (Ironically my grade was better in the former course, but that might be an institutional variation.)

Imagine studying physics and chemistry for a graduate school entrance exam, and then finding out that all the questions are "essay" questions, with no math. Sounds like a dream, huh? Well, after spending a few weeks studying formulas and variables, being asked to describe a "black body" can really throw you - and they don't mean Halle Berry.

Steve - it doesn't go away. When I started my current academic job, the finals week nightmares shifted to finding out I was supposed to be giving a final exam in a class I didn't know had been assigned to me, so I not only hadn't written the final, I hadn't taught it all semester. Eek.

Favorite hypothetical question: Given "chair", determine the entropy of the universe. Second worst exam moment: getting a phone call from my TA asking if I was planning to take the organic chem lab practical exam that was happening at that moment. I finished, but the crystals I isolated had the tinge of activated charcoal. Worst exam moment: finishing out my Bio 101 exam outside the bathroom while suffering from intense vomiting and diarrhea that started mid-exam (nothing like realizing that diarrhea was about to start while puking into a snowbank).

Carlie---the solution to that program is to tell everybody in the class that you have a choice for them: they can either walk away and be given a C on the final exam, or they can take the test and have a shot at getting a higher grade, with risk of a lower one.

Once the C-takers have gone, announce to the rest of the class that their perserverance/willingness to try/what-have-you has earned them an A.

Remind them that the world is run by those who show up.

Dismiss them, and leave.