They weren't accurate on the incline though.

You can measure it on the screen if you like. A bit of trigonometry and you'll come up with a number a bit over 11 degrees.

The best explanation of trigonometry I've ever seen.

Lasers, light, and the universe... 2012 will be amazing as predicted. I'm glad Obama couldn't stop all progress, despite his efforts... right QM?

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/12/more-evidence-found-for-quantum-physics-in-photosynthesis.ars

Quantum coherence in antenna-protein chlorophylls from green sulfur bacteria:

"A team led by Engel and Shaul Mukamel of the University of California, Irvine analyzed the fluctuation of lasers as they passed through antenna proteins. Depending on how they shifted, the researchers could track what happened inside.

They found a clear mathematical link between energy flows and fluctuations in chlorophyll coherence. The link was so clear it could be described in derivative sines and cosines, mathematical concepts taught in college trigonometry."

"The mounting evidence that quantum effects can be seen in natural systems when excited by lasers is compelling" - Greg Scholes, University of Toronto biophysicist

I've got two perspectives on some of these comments and the video, and thought I'd chime in with some (hopefully not overly longwinded) history / anecdotes:

First, I grew up and attended public school K-12 in Kansas in the 80's and 90's. Overall I am very pleased with the quality of education I received and the teachers I had. From High School, I remember having 3-4 standout excellent teachers, a whole lot of adequate / no-complaints teachers, and 3-4 teachers that I thought were sub-par.

The excellent teachers stand out in my memory because they got me more interested in subjects that I already had some interest in, OR because they made me appreciate subjects that I was otherwise pretty ambivalent about. For example, my math teacher who I studied Geometry, Advanced Algebra, Trigonometry, and AP Calculus with was fantastic. When I was in his classes, I loved learning about math. When I went to University and studied Calc 2 in a lecture hall with 400 other students and teacher-student interaction only with TAs, suddenly math wasn't anywhere near as interesting.

Some of the adequate teachers that I had were probably the favorite teachers of students with other interests. Expecting every teacher to mesh perfectly with absolutely every last one of their hundreds of students per year is probably setting the bar a little unrealistically high. That being said, even though I wasn't completely enthralled with their classes, I think that I got good value from them.

The teachers that I remember as being poor fall into two categories. First are those that taught subjects that I wasn't at all interested in and who did nothing to prompt me to change my mind. I remember hating one of my English teachers because she wasn't impressed with my lack of effort on things like poetry assignments. Looking back, I think that says much more about what I was putting into the class than the quality of that teacher. The other category had teachers that seemed lazy and ineffective, or those whose classes were complete wastes of time -- similar to those that @blankfist described. Most of those teachers were teacher/coaches who, in my point of view, were just phoning-in their teaching duties and only actively interested in the coaching. I still have a bias against sports being included in public school activities due to that type of teacher.


And I also have a perspective from the teaching side of things. I've been living in Thailand for about 4.5 years now, teaching English as a second language. I got a bachelor's degree in Computer Science but struggled finding a job when I graduated (I think I was naively setting my sights too high and too narrow, but thats another story). So, I ended up working as a farmhand on my family farm. That was OK but not really something that I was very passionate about.

Eventually through a family connection, someone approached me about traveling abroad for a year and working as an ESL teacher. I thought that would be an interesting thing to do and a good way to challenge myself, so I flew to Thailand in 2007 and started teaching. The school I connected with put me in as the teacher for kindergarten, which was crazy but fun and rewarding and a good sink or swim introduction to teaching (which I had no prior experience with or education in).

I ended up liking it so much that what was originally just going to be a 1-year experience got extended. I taught kindergarten for 2 years and 1st grade for 1 year. Then there was a big shakeup / administrative disaster at my former school and I switched into teaching High School aged students. Another challenge and something different to get used to, but I am enjoying that as much or more as the younger students.

Being a foreign, native-English-speaking ESL teacher in Thailand is a bit weird. There are lots of really *terrible* foreign teachers that are here to purely to have ready access to cheap beer and prostitutes, and who have absolutely zero interest in the actual teaching; it is just a paycheck. The average salary of a native-English speaking teacher here is about $12,000 a year, which sounds terribly low but is actually a pretty upper-middle class income by Thai standards. For the shitty teachers, it translates into a lot of beer and hookers.

The schools here see foreigners are all fairly identical, easily replaceable cogs. Someone with a master's degree in Education and a real interest in being a good teacher can easily be replaced by a drunken loser that rarely shows up for classes if they don't fall in line with the Thai way of doing things or try to change up the status quo.

I hope that I do a decent job of teaching here. I am confident that I'm way better for my students than many of the drunken backpacker alternatives, but it is dangerous to set the bar that low and get complacent. I'm sure that to a lot of my roughly 800 students this year, I am merely adequate -- not all that memorable but at least not bad either. I know that some of them get a lot out of my classes and I can see them improving in English in leaps and bounds. And I know that there are some on the other side of the coin who are at best ambivalent about me and their English classes in general. My level of motivation prompts me to try my best, but I am too lazy and don't have enough time to throw a whole lot of extra effort at each and every one of my 800 students, most of whom I see for 1 hour a week total.

Anyway, my experiences here have made me appreciate all of my excellent former teachers that much more. Plus, I've learned that anyone that thinks that a teacher in the US is sub-par ought to be thankful that they probably aren't quite as bad as a sub-par "teacher" in Thailand...

Since two folks haved shared education stories, I thought I'd share.

I grew up in Jackson Mississippi, yet despite how people perceive education there, most of my teachers were phenomenal. They cared about their subjects, and cared about us well enough to push us in ways we didn't like. I ended up graduating with a few college credits, and an eagerness to learn.

I remember a science teacher assigning me a science project to enter in a local competition. I did a eighth half ass job on it, the night before. But on a school day, she drove me to the convention center and made me stand there in humiliation in front of all the other kids who actually worked on their assignments and the judges who scrutinized me and asked me questions. That embarrassment and exposure woke me up a little about the consequences of doing a low quality job.

I've also had great civics and history teachers who cared enough to seriously address me and others when we challenged some of the assumptions underlying our system of government and its history. From what others have told me of apathetic teachers, I now think this engagement is/was not so common.

I remember taking trigonometry one summer; not because I had to take it over, but because a teacher volunteered to teach an extra course for people where were interested. She showered attention and encouragement on all of the pupils, and made an intimidating subject actually fun. That allowed me to take calculus in the fall with higher confidence in my math abilities.

These experiences stand out in my memory, but the level of engagement and enthusiasm was typical for my k-12 teachers.

A "bad" teacher? Once we had a physics teacher who had recently immigrated from China. His english was terrible, and he taught the class as though we were graduate students, not high school kids. He was also fit the stereotype of the awkward, bumbling egg head; once, in a lecture, he somehow bumped into an eye washer, and drenched his pants (worn up to his upper waist). In the middle of the semester, he had visa problems and we saw little of him since. I'm not sure how we learned any thing in that class.

Our books were OK, but the teachers were never shy about using outside materials to enhance the lesson, or having us bring in things relevant to the lessons.

>> ^notarobot:

Magnets? How do they work?


I think you missed a "fu&king" in there somewhere.

Can someone tell me how an integral, derivative, trigonometry, algebra, geometry, division, multiplication, adding, subtraction works and what these constants are (the ones I keep hearing about)? I've figured out the square root of -4 so no issues there.

We should cut these things out of school. THEY NEVER HELP YOU!!1!

/extreme sarcasm...

Wait a minute... People keep going back to porn because it "isn't working"? It doesn't "actually satisfy"? Ahh yes, as opposed to intimate sex with a loving partner, which you engage in one time and then you're completely satisfied and set for the rest of your life. ...Oh wait, she didn't intend to imply that? I don't think that porn viewing and a healthy mutually respectful and loving relationship with an actual human being are by any means mutually exclusive.

I hit puberty just as dialup internet was becoming available in my hometown. My family were early adopters and got internet service pretty much as soon as it was available. As you might imagine, I grew up with rather free and easy access to internet porn, and I browsed for quite a lot of it. However, I think that in examining my own experience as objectively as possible, I believe that I was able to self-police or direct my exposure away from the sorts of porn that I would agree are potentially damaging; for example violence, rape, or demeaning behavior (although definitions of each of those vary a lot). But in any case, I think that the reason that I was able to achieve this self-direction was though good parenting. If these things concern you, talk to your kids about it, and explain why. Provide them with the framework they need, and you'll probably be surprised at how well they react.


And just for one more anecdote, I thought I'd contribute a story that exposes just how much of a nerd I am. When I was a sophomore in High School, I was into math. I was taking trigonometry with mostly seniors and a few juniors. I had a complex graphing calculator, a Texas Instruments TI-85, with a roughly 2.5 inch by 3.5 inch screen. On the internet, you could download programs that would overwrite the basic "operating system" of the calculator, and allow you to load programs that people coded up in assembly language compatible with the machine's Z80 processor.

One such program was an image viewer. The calculator normally just had a 2-color liquid crystal screen; each pixel was either ON (black) or OFF (white). This viewer program allowed the screen to be treated as grayscale by adjusting the contrast/brightness values sent to individual pixels, as opposed the the screen as a whole as per usual.

What did I do with this program? I loaded it up with porn, of course. All softcore nudes, mostly Pamela Anderson as I recall. So, with the correct button presses to get into the assembly loader, I had a very low-resolution porn image browser. Being a sophomore, I thought that I could gain some "street cred" with the upperclassmen by showing off my porn. And, as you can probably guess, they immediately turned me in to the teacher just because it would be fun to watch me squirm. Fortunately, my teacher was very cool about it. He said: "I don't want to see it, I don't want to know about it, and if I ever hear anything about it again in the future, I'll be highly displeased". That was enough to get me to delete the program from the calculator.

The segment about porn on (the oh-so ubiquitous) cellphones brought that episode to mind.

Just giving a student more attention doesn't automatically mean they're doing better and everyone else doing worse, and it doesn't automatically lead to the better students somehow missing out or getting held back. There's nothing inhibiting students from maximizing their potential, whatever that means. Making sure everyone passes the bar and gets a sound education is what school is about, not forcing everyone to know the same things regardless of their ability to learn. It's about giving everyone as similar an education as possible, which practically means as much personal freedom to pursue ones own goals.
Of course it would be better if there were more teachers and smaller classes. But the fact of the matter is that most kids who do well in school are doing well because they have their parents' and/or private tutors involved in their education, helping out at home and being active in the child's upbringing. You'd be surprised how even the playingfield is when it comes to talent.

There's simply no validity to the saying that putting extra effort in helping the students who have a harder time learning leads to the students having an easier time learning would somehow lose part of their intelligence or are robbed of education. To be more precise: what is it those gifted students are missing out on? Because I still don't really understand what it would mean for a school to "maximize each individual's potential". As you know, school is for teaching kids broad, basic, general and useful information, to give them an understanding of the world and their surroundings and get them in an environment where they get to interact and cooperate with others. In that regard there is no such thing as lowering the bar when it comes to making an effort to get as many kids as possible to pass. In that regard there is only teaching as many as possible what they need to learn, and actually have them learn it. In geography they need to know what continents are located where, major countries and capital cities etc. In music they need to have tried playing a couple of instruments, sung a couple of songs and learned the basics of music creation. By "maximizing their potential", would that mean making them memorize all countries and cities, make them compose music and become proficient in several instruments?
This doesn't mean that because one kid is done with its calculus and another isn't, that the first will sit on its behind until the second is done aswell. That's a ridiculus proposition and one which we all know isn't how schools work. There's advanced calculus, trigonometry and a host of other things for them to learn. But there are base skills that needs to be known by a student,
things that have been agreed upon by society that a student has to have a grasp of. That's why students struggling to learn them need to get extra help, not because they're raising hell and causing a ruckus.

I'd like to point you to a form of education called the "Montessori method", which has shown great potential and results thus far in preschools and gradeschools, and where the students are encouraged to learn by themselves by teachers changing the dynamics of the classroom aswell as have them take on a different role from the standard lecturer. It's shown that children can not only learn faster and more qualitatively by doing, but they're also improving their own knowledge by helping their friends and classmates learn. Your statement about forcing students to become assistant teachers is not only flat out wrong, it shows a lack of understanding of the subject.

There's also university, where people generally go to maximize their potential. That's where they narrow down their education to one or a couple of fields, and develop their personal interests and/or potential into a profession and hopefully a career.

1. I hate memes.

2. I dated a girl because she owned a 69 Corvette Stingray.

3. I am teaching myself Trigonometry and Calculus.

4. I ate 30 packets of Smarties candy today.

5. My teeth hurt.

6. I really hate living in Boise, Idaho.

7. I refuse to move because I fear change.

8. I wrote a letter to President Clinton when I was 10 years old, asking him to make abortion illegal.

9. I've never been outside of the United States.

10. My roommate got me hooked on Sudoku.

11. I think of Timothy McVeigh as a war hero.

12. I am not racist against people who don't fit stereotypes.

13. I am an excelent speler.

14. I am a virgin.

15. I've never been to Virginia.

16. I am fascinated by the etymology of words.

17. I can say the alphabet backwards while drunk...flawlessly.

18. I am a boring person.

19. I love wearing Hawaiian shirts.

20. My first memory is of my neighbor's dog, Oscar, trying to bite my left index finger off. Apparently they don't like to be poked in the eye by a toddler.

21. I've never broken a bone.

22. I have been known to troll chat rooms disguised as an ultra-conservative Christian.

23. I have a picture of Jessica Tandy in my wallet...don't ask.

24. My seventh birthday party was at McDonald's. I haven't been back since then.

25. I am a vegetarian.

>> ^Kagenin:
The cruel thing is that the kid will never grasp Trigonometry...
Oh, and you left Moonunit off that list, Mackerel (can I call you O-Saba san?) (if you're gonna get one Zappa kid on a short list of freaky names, you gotta at least list two... Ahmed, not so freaky I guess...)


You are absolutely right. Shame on me =)

The cruel thing is that the kid will never grasp Trigonometry...

Oh, and you left Moonunit off that list, Mackerel (can I call you O-Saba san?) (if you're gonna get one Zappa kid on a short list of freaky names, you gotta at least list two... Ahmed, not so freaky I guess...)

Delurking long enough to say that I masturbated to this song while fantasizing about a girl who sat next to me in trigonometry class who loved this song. And she had big hooters. I mean REALLY big hooters. Being the sophisticated, selective teen that I was, I totally fell in love with her.

But then a friend of mine started dating her. So then it turned into hate-masturbation. If you were ever 16 and male, you know EXACTLY what I mean.

Thanks to heavy medication and 25 years of therapy, I'm almost over it. God bless Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals.

My shame knows no boundaries.

Ah, the fun of trigonometry and trajectory in a limited space. And a whole lot of "fluke" probability.

My Trigonometry professor in college, Mr. Deceaux (Southern Polytechnic State University) could also draw circles like this, without looking at the board. It really freaked me out the first time he did it. He was also highly eccentric and had the Einstein Hair(TM).