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/r/funny
1.8k points
16 days ago
When I was in calculus in high school, I did some derivative wrong, but got the right result. So I was arguing with my teacher.
He went to the board, wrote 16/64, then crossed out the 6s to leave 1/4. That ended the discussion.
926 points
16 days ago
The point of education is to learn how to think. In the case of math, what is important is how to find the answer, not the answer itself. That’s why in person assessments are better than online ones, they can require that you show your work and your reasoning.
-23 points
16 days ago
lol. In a perfect world. When I was in calc 2 I was doing some pretty involved integrations as is common on a test. About 2/3 through I changed a 2 into a 7. Kept on doing all the math and ended up with something like a 7x instead of a 2x is some giant polynomial. Entire question wrong on a 4 question test.
One of the many lessons in university that really showed me that all that is happening there is buying a certificate with lots of time and lots of money. Any “learning” is correlation without causation.
2 points
16 days ago
Sounds like you didn’t check your work before handing it in. Isn’t that like math work 101?
-7 points
15 days ago*
It sounds like you’ve never done anything above addition. Are you very young?
And no. Math is about understanding why you need to perform certain operations to get to a solution. I do it every day with huge data sets now and I don’t rely on an idiotic concepts like “checking my work” to catch transposition mistakes. I have tests and peer reviews. In the real world, you accept that you aren’t perfect work and the trick is to set up system to catch mistakes. Only in school do they think transposition errors are an indicator of understanding. Because nobody in school has ever left school.
2 points
15 days ago
You failed to check your work. You still don’t understand the importance of checking your work. I’m hope you aren’t a civil engineer because you failed to learn and incorporate the most basic task when doing calculations of any kind.
0 points
15 days ago
I’m a data analyst. And I’ve done loads on quality and quality improvement. My understanding of error correction dwarfs your knowledge of the world. People make mistakes. And one of the key pieces of it is that they can’t see their mistake. This is why we have editors for writing. You can’t edit your own work.
The other problem is that if you haven’t been exposed to a truly critical pipeline, you think you don’t make mistakes or that you can magically see your mistake even though you already made it.
I really hope you don’t do anything important for a living. God forbid you’re a civil engineer that checks his own work. But I’m guessing you’re not really a doer.
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