We can all be a bit stupid about math sometimes. Or at least make mistakes because we’re going too fast and not paying attention.
When I lecture, I’ve got maybe a third of my attention on the actual math. The other two-thirds is divided between writing neatly, showing all the steps, remembering to use both the proper terms and more casual terms so students know what I’m saying, keeping an eye on the students in general, and keeping an eye on the clock because I am an A-type personality and can’t deal with the idea of not fitting into my given time-frame. Between that and being slightly dyslexic, mistakes are made.
You pretend that you meant to make the mistake, to see if any of the students caught it. It’s harder to fake when students ask where the 18 came from, and you have no idea where the 18 is in the problem because you’re slightly dyslexic and therefore can’t see it.
Yesterday’s lesson, however, was a fun fail.
We were using the secant, which already puts the students in a bad mood because they don’t like secants. In Trigonometry, we like to use theta for our variables, but when we get to calculus, we usually say, fuck that, x is easier. So I was solving a problem including the secant of x.
Those of you who know math notation probably already know where this is going.
Because mathematicians are lazy, we decided that writing “secant” was way too many letters, so we use sec for short. When we write “sec x”, we mean the secant of x.
So, needless to say, my brain decided to write even fewer letters, and thus I solved the problem using “se x”. And it took me way too long to notice I’d done it.
Is a bunch of 18/19 years really going to stop their professor from writing sex mid-problem? Especially when half of them probably think it’s a notation they just don’t know, while the others are just giggling over it?
Yeah, so I didn’t notice until the end of the problem. And since I frequently used the tangent after the secant, my problem says “sex tan x”.
You’re welcome.
