@dfern.eth

One of the worst teachers I ever had was an highschool AP calculus teacher who once said (paraphrased): "once you get to this level of math, you're just doing it for the fun of it, there's no practical application." I ended up retaking calculus over the summer at the local community college with an retired Silicon Graphics engineer as the professor, and he was definitely one of the best teachers I've had. (For those who don't know, NVidia was basically born out of SGI's collapse) This is going to get quite ranty but now that I'm on my soapbox: I've luckily had very few moments with horrible teachers but they all orbit around the same motif: the instructor thinks their subject is a dead end—some kind of intellectual masturbation that is a curiosity for nerds with no practical application—in otherwords the economic cash value of the ideas are $0 and the only point in learning the subject is a kind of nihilistic social class currency among other intellectuals, so the point is to 'perform' knowledge not actually to study, learn, and apply. The best teachers know their subject is valuable and therefore care that their students understand on the deepest level!

1 reply

3 recasts

8 reactions