and yet. and yet i am more likely to get kicked out than the stoner kid, evidently, because i suck too hard at euclid.
i don't know what to do, really. i am supposed to meet with my math tutor on friday, and i am supposed to "think creatively" until then. i am supposed to find a way to make euclid have meaning for me, because i am clearly not enjoying myself and every prop i present is a fucking trainwreck. i am supposed somehow to square this with his simultaneous advice that i approach euclid by memorising every step of every proposition, since i can't manage to demonstrate them any other way. everyone else has been counselled to step away from this approach and to view the the study of geometry more broadly. my only hope is to work my ass off in an attempt to get where everyone else started, and i fucking hate being there.
posted by anne @ 6:02 PM
5 Comments:
You don't say how you feel about Euclid or the math tutorial, which I think matters more at this stage. Do you agree with what your tutor is saying? Do you think your tutor is smoking the fucking crack cocaine? Its important to know these things.
If, for example, you feel that Euclid is being plenty meaningful to you, but you are not being vocal about it in class, thats one thing. If you think Euclid can go suck duck eggs, thats something else.
The only way I could ever do propositions on the board is to memorize every step and present it more or less verbatim. Presenting is not the eidos of math tutorial.
Ah, Euclid. One of the first great moments in my life where I realized that almost everyone in the room was smarter than I was.
All I can say is that I very much regret letting Euclid get my entire St. John's math experience off on the wrong foot, that I could have learned to do it better, and that I dearly wish I had.
Math tutorial was frequently my favorite part of the Program, so maybe my advice is not useful. I just sat down and worked through propositions in a notebook over and over again until I internalized them. If it's the actual presentation part that's giving you fits, go fill an entire classroom's worth of blackboards with the same proposition. There is a step where you go from memorizing to understanding, but it is not an easy step.
But, also, keep in mind Neil's advice. It could be the tutor. I had Mr. Russell for Freshman Math and he felt about Euclid the way you do--his ideal class was one in which everybody did their presentations perfectly so he wasn't required to do anything.
It could also be the class--I always felt that people should be offering suggestions when somebody was at the board having trouble with a presentation, not sitting back watching them suffer.
This is going to sound weird, but maybe try doing the proof yourself? Get together a list of all the things proven up to that point, write down what you're going to need to prove, and do it backwards. Think, "Okay, if this is true, what also is true?" And then those other things that are true usually end up being steps in the proof.
My advice would be to corner one of the kids it comes easy to, have them demonstrate it at the board, and just question absolutely everything you don't understand.
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