Sin

Feb 28, 2004 20:42

Last Sunday, after a couple games of spades, I tried to give my sister a hand with her math homework. The tenth grader, geometry. There were a few problems with the intent. First, I didn't really see what she needed a hand with - the problems appeared to be the veriest trivia and finishable in under two minutes. This, compiled with the fact that she just wanted it done, with as little effort as possible, made it quite difficult to not just do the problems for her.

The problems were based around some "special" right triangles - 45-45-90, 30-60-90. Given one side, figure out the others. I didn't know if she'd been given the "formulas" in class to memorize or not. Maybe they're familiar to you - for the first, the length of the hypontenuse is bigger than the sides by a factor of root(2). For the second, the length of the hypontenuse is double the length of the short side, and the "medium" side is bigger than the short side by a factor of root(3).

After some bit of time trying to get her to derive those bits from the basic triangle length equation beaten into you at an early age (c^2 = a^2 + b^2 - a*b*cos(C) where C is the angle opposite the side c, but ignoring the last bit as cos(90) is, uh, zero), and watching her struggle with moving roots around even when having them, it finally hit me that she didn't know how to handle roots in equations. At all.

If I put a = 9*b, and asked her to solve the equation for b, she could do it instantly. If the equation was a = b*root(9), she neither saw that root(9) was three (at which point she could deal with it in her usual manner), or could deal with it as an entity or variable that was irreducable.

She's in tenth grade! She's had a term of algebra. While she doesn't actually grok fractions, she can manipulate them algebraically. She's certainly seen roots before. But even after I went through the basics of 'em again for her - how to turn integers into roots and back again, how they're just another entity when it comes to adding, multiplying, and so on - she just froze when trying to deal with 'em.

And she didn't -want- to learn about them. I've certainly never been any great shakes at studying or learning, but even I am interested by new things. It wasn't a success that evening. Her homework did get done. But I think I made her dislike math (and learning) that much more, rather than helping.

EDIT: Piss on geometry - my understanding of the world is gained algebraically, so that's how I try to pass on what little understanding I do have.
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