• Acute_Engles [he/him, any]
    ·
    9 days ago

    I took physics in highschool and did quite well, took the advanced class in grade 12 and hit a brick wall so hard i dropped the class within a month and took a study block. There's a certain type of math that twists the brain into a knot

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]
      ·
      9 days ago

      Definitely. For me, a lot of the Calc 1 type material was easy. I remember the first exam had a question where you were given a long equation that described a particle's movement over time. You were asked to get the equation for its velocity and acceleration. I found that pretty easy since it's just the first and second derivatives. But the third exam had some questions about tension that involved solving simultaneous equations for 3 or 4 free bodies, with like 3 unknowns? So you had to derive all the equations, use a matrix and Gaussian elimination to solve them, and it probably had a few more steps I'm forgetting. The final had a lot of thermodynamics stuff involving Carnot cycles etc etc. I took the actual thermodynamics course years later and I still don't get it.

      Fun class tho. My professor was an old Cuban man. He told us a few anecdotes from when he lived in Cuba, like explaining the concept of pressure with an example of how, in the crowded buses, sometimes a lady wearing heels would step on your foot and the weight is concentrated into the small point of the heel.