Future Leadership Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War 1815

(Charles Richmond) writes:

I breezed through math in high school, but halfway through my second year at university I lost it. I think I still have a feel for it in some obscure way, but the courses didn't seem to help at all. A typical textbook would review trivial facts on the first half of the first page, then take a huge, non-intuitive leap into something truly obscure, usually accompanied by the phrase "It is obvious that..." In addition, there was no attempt to tie the concepts back to the "real world", which set me completely adrift. A physics course I was taking, on the other hand, gave me a solid, practical use for complex numbers when it started dealing with AC electrical circuits.

I was fortunate enough to have a good teacher in junior high - he saw my interest and even lent me his old school textbooks, which gave me a head start on logs and trig. He even showed me how to calculate square roots using what looks like a more complicated version of long division. That kind of attention truly is an incentive builder.

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