Comment by newjersey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newjersey | Hacker News Reader

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We had a new teacher for maths in eighth grade. I remember how enthusiastic he was about set theory. He was so excited to talk about it and reminisced that the first time he saw set theory was in the second year of college.

Granted our stuff was just introductory stuff but I doubt I'd care the slightest between AND and OR and associate them with intersection and union if it wasn't for the teachers.

Now my professor in college who teaches operating systems? She could not be more of a downer. You go ask her a question and she says "I can't answer any questions off the top of my head. I am not a genius." Never has she ever said "let's see" or "let's try to figure this out". Her level of enthusiasm makes me wonder why she even teaches at all. She appears exhausted and sad.

To go a little off topic, I want a universal basic income (and universal free healthcare) so that people who don't like the jobs they do or would like to take a break can do so without worrying about money.

Well, I guess my point is school can be boring or interesting depending on the teachers around you. This seems rather obvious. My hypothesis is that teachers who want to teach are likely to be better teachers than those who are just there because they need money.

I was bored, not because of the teachers, but because I didn't have to do much work to comprehend the material.

I never thought of telling anyone that I was working through the rest of the textbook just to keep myself occupied in class. I just kept my head down and did my best to un-bore myself.

Which bit me in the rear end when I got to University and started taking classes that required studying.

Haha, this is how I feel too. I had the mistaken assumption in middle school that "if this is all they're teaching me, there must not be that much to know". Then when I got to college I realized that everything taught at the undergraduate level and below constitutes a negligible fraction of everything that has been discovered.

Instead of stretching mundane material that could have been taught in a week or two (calculus, etc.) over a period of years, I would have much preferred taking all of my engineering courses then. That would have left plenty of time in undergrad to learn topics as diverse as representation theory, semidefinite programming, quantum information theory, lambda calculus, etc. Instead, I have to learn these things on my own as a grad student in an ad-hoc fashion. Occasionally, courses on these topics become available, but they pop up at random semesters and you can't take all of them.

Seems like you did the best thing you could have, in the circumstances. When I was bored in class, I didn't study the textbook, I read science fiction novels.

Depending on your institution, it's quite possible that your professor is there for research instead of teaching. It's unfortunate that today an academic who wishes to have job security must do one in order to do the other. Also consider the possibility that she is simply uncomfortable responding extemporaneously in front of an audience (I remember one of my lecturers who could barely do basic arithmetic while at the whiteboard, presumably out of anxiety).

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