the new math: old battle of the lovees was: PDP1 3606

snip

The most important lesson may have been that there seemed to be some intuition about the physical world that was needed to really "get" physics, and I didn't have it. I wonder if that could have been fixed with good teaching, or if it's something people either have or don't have. On the long-term "to do" queue is to try Feynman's three-volume set "Lectures on Physics" -- on a quick skim, it seems that he might be good at conveying this intuitive understanding.

school was probably more helpful in that regard. (I think the first few times the course was taught, students' designs were actually fabricated. That would have been cool, but it had been discontinued by the time I got there. We tested our designs with various simulators -- no doubt not exactly like the real thing, but still capable of delivering some memorable "theory versus practice" learning experiences.)

Well ....

"Kindergarten" to me means "easy problems, no challenge". The high-school chemistry teacher who buttigned twenty problems that were basically all the same -- that was "kindergarten". Some people have no tolerance at all for this kind of drill work; I think others find it the mental equivalent of a brisk walk around the block -- sort of a pleasant middle ground between doing nothing at all and doing something "too hard". But this is a tangent ....

Sorry about the melodrama, if that's how it came across.

My point was to distinguish between problems that are hard in a way that makes them a hard-to-resist challenge, and problems that are hard in a way that's just discouraging -- and maybe it's just laziness to think there are any problems in that second category.

I think there's a middle ground between easy boring problems and problems that are "too hard". YMMV, maybe.

snip

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.