because I need a list to prove I'm badass

[liz3000]

I've been so down lately. I didn't get into grad school. I don't have a job where I want one. I am not living where I want to. I'm a complete sell-out and I let my job push me around. Shitty things have happened, some of the events were in my control, but some weren't. But I forget that I'm capable of doing awesome things every once in a while.

Comments

more

[womaninphysics]

11. You are a fun person to hang out with
12. You are a great teacher and are helping change the impression kids have of physics, one student at a time.
13. You know calculus. Not just know it, but know why it is useful and can actually use it to solve interesting real-world problems. This is very unusual in the real world.

Re: more

[liz3000]

Thanks! I miss getting to do calculus just so that I can solve real world problems.

Today I eavesdropped on the physics teacher I share a room with as I was gathering some materials. A student asked him why the speed of a wave changes when it goes into a different medium. He said it was because math says so and wrote down Snell's law. The kid started to ask again, but the teacher just repeated himself but louder, and the kid gave up. I was about to scream!

Re: more

[womaninphysics]

So, in my education class one of the future bio teachers said that he didn't like high school calculus because it didn't seem useful or related to the real world!!!! Can you believe that? It's like the most useful math ever, it made me really love math.

I miss doing calculus too :( I sometimes get to do calculations, but usually they are so complicated that I need to do them numerically or on mathematica.

Re: more

[liz3000]

This sounds dumb, but sometimes I get the urge to pull Jackson or something off the shelf and work problems. I miss the problems that take like 15 pages to solve. I like the way your brain feels when it goes into that math zone. It's a level of thinking that you really can't achieve doing anything else.