PixelProf

@PixelProf@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just Terrible⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I love that friend group A is a gradient.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you have what it takes to become a geologist?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Geode colouring matched Ace Flag colouring.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calculus made easy⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I may be wrong but I think it usually comes down to a very specific kind of precision needed. It’s not meant to be hostile, I think, but meant to provide a domain-specific explanation clearly to those who need to interpret it in a specific way. In law, specific jargon infers very specific behaviour, so it’s meant to be precise in its own way (not a law major, can’t say for sure), but it can seem completely meaningless if you aren’t prepped for it.

  Same thing in other fields. I had a professor who was very pedantic about {braces} vs [brackets] vs (parentheses), and it seemed totally unnecessary to be so corrective in discussions, but when explaining where things went wrong with a student’s work it was vital to be able to quickly differentiate them in their work so they could review the right areas or understand things faster during a lecture later down the line.

  But that noise takes longer to teach through, so if it is important, it needs it’s own time to learn, and it will make it inaccessible to anyone who didn’t get that time to learn and digest it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calculus made easy⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely! One of the difficulties that I have with my intro courses is working out when to introduce the vocabulary correctly, because it is important to be able to engage with the industry and the literature, but it adds a lot of noise to learning the underlying concepts and some assessments end up losing sight of the concept and go straight to recalling the vocab.

  Knowing the terms can help you self-learn, but a textbook glossary could do the same thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calculus made easy⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There was a lovely computer science book for kids I can’t remember the name of, and it was all about the evil jargon trying to prevent people from mastering the magical skills of programming and algorithms. I love these approaches. I grew up in an extremely non/anti-academic environment, and I learned to explain things in non-academic ways, and it’s really helped me as an intro lecturer.

  Jargon is the mind killer. Shorthands are for the people who have enough expertise to really feel the depths of that shorthand and use it to tickle the old familiar neurons they represent without needing to do the whole dance. It’s easy to forget that to a newcomer, the symbol is just a symbol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calculus made easy⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Functional programming is much more math oriented and I think works well here, as it likes to violate a lot of these rules as a rule. I think it’s what makes it so challenging and so obvious for different folks.