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Comment by Evbn | Hacker News Reader

Every now and again I think my highfalutin college courses were an overpriced waste, and then a conversation like this comes along and I see that the fundamentals of my courses are apparently radical and unheard of most other places.

Do schools really not teach the underlying concepts of math, or do people just fail to understand them the first time through and then blame their teachers?

/took linear algebra in the math department, then TAed it.

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>Do schools really not teach the underlying concepts of math, or do people just fail to understand them the first time through and then blame their teachers?

It is absolutely the case that a great many students will not remember seeing material that they definitely were exposed to. As someone who's TA'd physics classes for a few years, I'd often ask a recitation whether they'd covered some particular subject yet in lecture, and they'd often say (as a class) no.

I'd ask the professor later, and of course they had -- but students rarely go into lecture having done the reading or prep work, and so have a piss-poor retention rate.

> students rarely go into lecture having done the reading or prep work, and so have a piss-poor retention rate.

I've found that even if do the reading, my brain is often, well, a bit leaky... TT

They were a waste. You paid an arm and a leg to learn some spreadsheet manipulation functions.

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