How To Prove It makes this claim on the back cover: "Many students have trouble the first time they take a mathematics course in which proofs play a significant role." Speaking from personal experience, Captain ILL finds this to be true, though he does not lay the blame on the subject of proofs. Long ago, when the Captain was in the 10th grade, he had geometry class with Mr. Mayberry. This nincompoop liked to say things like "then you say to yourself 'self' " and various other entertainingly moronic inanities. Mr. Mayberry was the worst teacher Captain ILL ever had, and this includes various math TAs who could not speak English. His idea of teaching involved standing before the class for five minutes or so and breezing through a few geometrical ideas, and pointing out that the textbook went into much greater depth. The rest of the class consisted of a free-for-all in which one girl spent her time throwing spitballs at the Captain. Shame on you Mr. Mayberry! Captain ILL is still pretty fuzzy about that whole Pythagorian Theorem thingie, and what the heck is a hypotenuse anyway?
4 comments:
I'm reminded of a calculus teacher we had in community college. He used to tell us that in order to be successful in class we HAD to pretend that we have "an enemy" and he's out to embarass us. I didn't do this and as a result got a C in the class.
Here's to hoping that Captain ILL is never embarassed by the enemy.
Who is this enemy? Why would he want to embarrass you? This story sounds like it could be the subject of a full blown post on your own blog, complete with pictures and embarrassing details.
Actually I don't know who this enemy was but I can tell you with certainty that I'm embarrassed that I misspelled "embarrass".
Don't be "emrarrassed" Bowlingjoe, I might have misspelled it too if I didn't have my trusty Firefox spellchecker to help me out.
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