A bit more on my educational history. It made me imagine that I hated math.
I took zero math-related classes my senior year of high school. I had all the necessary credits to graduate, and the way the subject was taught was so painful that I couldn’t stomach another minute of it, even though I was a good student.
You could chalk it up to poorly-funded small town schools, but I’m not the only one who, ironically, was never taught in school how to THINK about things, as opposed to, say, rote memorization and working specific problems, over and over and over (because that shape of problem will be on a standardized test).
It was in this environment that the book Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson totally blew my mind. He starts off saying, ‘What one fool can do, so can other’. He takes the wind out of instructors who complicate how math is taught, and explains concepts in everyday language (but the exercises quickly ramp up in complexity…)
This book was a turning point in my education. It helped me repair the damage inflicted by the school system, and start really THINKING.
This post 100% human-written.