Forthwith

For the 3rd or 4th time in a row, my math teacher has failed to give us all of the necessary notes to finish our homework. Fortunately she never checks homework anyway until the end of each chapter, but it's still really annoying. But unfortunately DeMoivre's theorem and the theorem for nth roots of a complex number are somewhat difficult to teach oneself. But I've placed my finger on what I dislike about her so much. She doesn't know how to derive anything, and doesn't know any proofs. She can't explain why anything is the way it is. To her (and she literally says this), it's just about understanding the process so you can do the problems from the book and get an A on the test. Someone asked her why you obtain a particular set of vector components when you project a vector onto another vector, because theoretically there are an infinite number of vectors that add to a given resultant. She said something to the effect that she didn't know, she didn't want the person to ask that question because vectors are "a physics thing", and it was just some "math thing" that was "just the way it was". This is absolutely unbelievable to me. The very definition of vector components is that they are orthogonal, so a projection of u onto v gives a vector w1 on vector v and a vector w2 is orthogonal to w1. w1 and w2 are thus the vector components of u. This won't make any sense to anyone who hasn't studied trigonometry recently, but that's not the point. The point is that the very definition, the underpinning of what we are learning is not understood by my math teacher... Because she just learned a bunch of processes when she decided erroneously that she could switch from teaching PE to math 6 years ago, never truly understanding what she was doing. Having math reduced to a bunch of linear processes to be memorized has really made this year unfortunately dull, but made me all the more excited for calculus next year.

I'm beginning to dabble with some new authors. I'm reading some Vonnegut and liking it a lot, and I checked out some Nietzsche today. There really is an amazing set of German thinkers from the 19th century into the early 20th century: Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Goethe, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenburg... the list goes on. Of course, the rest of German society went through sort of a series of mental breakdowns in the World Wars, but it's still pretty amazing that such a reletively small society could have such a profound impact on the modern world.

Speaking of the further decline in education, there is my chemistry project. Instead of actually teaching us at all for the next unit, our teacher has come up with a "really good idea": have us make a chemistry newspaper that addresses "learning objectives" by "creatively" incorporating chemistry ideas into things that one would find in a newspaper, like ads and crossword puzzles. We have every day in class for 2 weeks to work on it, and we "self evaluate" ourselves on how efficient we were in class. Furthermore, the project is not actually graded by the teacher; rather, it is "peer-evaluated". Alternative learning (as Kadish, Ted, and I have branded this) needs to die and rot in hell. It teaches hatred of the secondary education industry, not chemistry.