I don't have high hopes for mods anymore--devs that do support mods seem to be only interested in doing it in a way that's curated and monetizable. People who want to make a Stargate TC or similar are probably going to have to start from scratch in Unity or Unreal from now on.

Most of all I'm gonna miss being able to go online and download Homer Simpson and other crazy models for deathmatch games. Everything's based around balanced classes w/special abilities now so that's a non-starter.

Why would you buy loot boxes if you could get exactly what you want by downloading a mod for free?

Why would they?

Are you really expecting them to remember that stuff from high school?

Compared to other sections where some students performed perfectly, I had no students get 100% on a quiz that involved those.

Take some responsibility for your profession.

Whose fault is it when students don't succeed?

You should make it your goal to leave a lasting enough impression on your students that one of them writes a double-LP concept album about how scarred they are by you.

I take it back, several students did fine. Average is still a bit low.

They think my quizzes are hard, but then get pummeled by the test. My students did better than average though.

I didn't mean to imply that it was your fault.

But maybe your profession's.

(Blaming the student's for their own failure is usually a huge red flag when expressed by an educator.)

There's always going to be a few students who don't try and don't come in for help, there's not much we can do to help if they aren't willing. Though, yes, that's true of instructors and even true more generally, people who don't ever internalize problems with their work tend to not do a good job.

maybe it's because sequences are a prerequisite for understanding limits are a prerequisite for understanding integrals are a prerequisite for understanding series, but you put sequences and series in the same quiz

I didn't write chapter 11 of Stewart.

There's a whole different discussion about the question of just why students enroll in a class like calculus, and the answers you'll get don't really bode well for an idealistic, classical conception of what a lecture course should be from the point of view of good teachers and students alike.

With that depressing picture in mind, you realize that being a good teacher in many ways boils down to having heroic patience and avoiding cynicism at all costs. And I say heroic because the odds are stacked against you.

If we were like Finland we'd pay high school teachers a lot more and recruit PhD's, maybe things would be different. But what's the point if we're just keeping kids in line by keeping them off the street and out of trouble while they learn to become slaves.

The students here are really good, my uni is one of the best UG institutions. The problem really is the exams are written by the department and are exceedingly hard, so I'm having to write quizzes that prepare for the exams and don't just amount to a technical homework problem.

It's a fine balance to strike, questions which are enough like the homework to be understandable but aren't too easy to be rote.

Reid, uuuughhh......

""Doing so may enhance a level of enjoyment by the player for the game-related purchase, which may encourage future purchases," according to the patent. "For example, if the player purchased a particular weapon, the microtransaction engine may match the player in a gameplay session in which the particular weapon is highly effective, giving the player an impression that the particular weapon was a good purchase. This may encourage the player to make future purchases to achieve similar gameplay results.""

https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/news/how-activision-uses-matchmaking-tricks-to-sell-in-game-items-w509288

I'm with Jon actually. Calculus was way harder than it had to be. In my experience the best texts / professors in upper division are the ones who make you realize how stupidly easy things ought to be if you don't compress or jumble things for no reason. In fact the entire first semester of upper division math is just unlearning the wrong point of view engendered by lower division calculus.

My comment about "bad" students was just as much directed toward the fact that most students who take the class will never use it again, and most who do couldn't care less if the machine calculus you've handed them keeps calculating for them reliably as they go on to things like physics or engineering. It doesn't matter how good a student you are if you have no inherent reason to care other than passing or even acing the class.

Engineers have their own calculu curriculum, it's only science majors. And I'd love to take a more analytical approach to the course, except I don't pick the book, subject matter or test questions so my hand is kind of forced.

I'm only a TA this year after all.

Also, I have been emphasizing more analytical concepts. My quizzes are often solvable by knowing how to set up an inequality, and I try to encourage that sort of reasoning.

Unfortunately more homework questions are dedicated to telescoping series than inequalities.

Something something capitalism something.

I have a feeling the 90's - 00's, and a bit bleeding into the 10's were the golden era of gaming. There's still some good stuff to be found, but I find games have gone up drastically in cost without getting much more fun.

And now Call of Duty matchmaking is going to be deliberately unfair to encourage wallet warrioring!

How slanderous. Sequences and series belong together because they are both ordered lists of numbers, sometimes infinite, so it's not for no reason. Well, I mean, except one of them isn't an ordered list of numbers, it's a sum, but it can be represented as an ordered list of numbers for analysis. And they both might be convergent or non-convergent, so they should be taught together, even though the meaning of convergence is very different in each case which I guess might be confusing but the words are the same so it definitely makes sense to teach them at the same time. And it's okay that you can't have understood integration without having learned sequences long ago, but the students seemed okay memorizing a bunch of formulas, so they'll have no problem memorizing series convergence tests and how to compute a partial sum, even though they'll never understand why it works. Unless they major in math, in a 4th year analysis course, that is.

Infinite sums are just limits of partial sums, so top level they are just sequences, which is why it makes sense to pair them. I find often once students get this, much of the rest of the distinctions become clearer.

As for sequences and limits, it's true that limits are defined in terms of sequences in which any open ball around a point containing all terms past a certain N converges to that point, but frankly that's hardly ever used outside of intro topology stuff. Analysts are far more likely to use the Cauchy property of a sequence and the completeness of the reals or complex numbers to know the limit exists, without even determining what it is. In calculus, the only examples of limits students see are ones where it's easy to infer what the limit should be and use simple tests to find it. Which is why that's what they learn. It seems like a poor use of time to teach students limits more rigorously only to throw it away and say "nah just kidding here's the short hand". The A students might get more out of it, I suppose.

Also, in analysis typically series precede integration, as integration is defined in terms of sums, which often have to be infinite.

Until grad real analysis, when apparently they just shove measure theory down your throat because who cares about Riemann integrals or anything relating to applicable mathematics.

Still, once you know enough math to grasp all of the concepts of calculus clearly you're probably just learning analysis anyway.

I wonder, to you software guys, how useful has your calculus knowledge been? Does it crop up regularly?

You mean like what Knuth does in TAOCP?

I would be suprised if most people who call themselves programmers would even know how to computer a sum, let alone find the asymptotic complexity of an angorithm they wrote.

At any rate most code I've read just cite a paper or wikipedia article describing the algorithm, where some researcher has already worked out its complexity.

I've used it once or twice for asymptotic complexity analysis. Why? Should it be generally useful? You can always choose to work in a problem domain where calculus is important, but it mostly isn't. I can't imagine a javascript web frontend developer ever needing to know it.



Citing the source of the algorithm?? lol, academic spotted

Maybe? I don't really know what he does is TAOCP, closest I've got is a quick foray into Turing machines.



I mean, that's fine to teach calculus for edification's sake, but that sort of confirms my suspicion that restructuring it to be more like analysis is just going too far off the tracks for what people want (and, in some cases, might even be capable of..). Classes where you learn, I don't know, numerical methods for solving PDEs or Matlab are probably more useful than properly understanding limits for most academic researchers.

Redoing the curriculum to include sequences first (and at a minimally competent level) will take at least a few weeks extra time, which means other material will have to be cut down.

He uses calculus

This was cooler when you had the vertical calculus too

4 c h a n, you have to go back
c
h
a
n

You see, this is it, this is the **** right here. On the homework the students were asked if this series converges:



Okay, not too bad looking. I checked the website's proposed solution, and this is what I saw:



What in the name of **** is that? Who has the time to even bother to follow the steps, nonetheless work that out on their own? Yet this is the **** they present to students. But what's really annoying? What's really annoying about this ****, is one can fairly easily see:



Which converges to 0 by the p-test. This is the **** that frustrates me about calculus education, when they emphasize these ass-**** long solutions. How does this help students learn?

Tbf, the prohibition on using results not yet proved in class follows one into junior-level analysis. Otherwise, you can just cite a bunch of theorems involving compactness without too much understanding.

I am more concerned about the effect of that TeX on my eyes

I would assume the fact that sum of all 1/n^2 converges is mentioned at least once before week 7

in that case it's just mathturbation

(unlike LISP!)

So theoretically yes, because I guess inequalities regarding series* isn't given until the section after this. However, in section one they gave inequalities regarding sequences. Now, once a student realizes that an infinite series is the limit of the sequence of its partial sums, then they should realize that the inequalities they know regarding sequences hold for the partial sums. Thus if you have two (nonnegative) sequences, and each term of a_n is greater than each term of b_n, then so will the partial sums by elementary rules of inequalities. In other words, the relevant theorems about inequalities with series is a corollary of the same inequalities with sequences. The problem is, inequalities like these are given less space than all of the other stupid stuff, so like, the number one most useful tool for showing convergence is displaced in favor of other methods, and students don't get the space to realize why this is true.

I suppose the "real" point of the question was to show how the integral test works. Which is important, but doing so with equations where it's not necessary, especially giant messes like the recommended solution seem like a waste of time. They did have some problems where straightforward inequalities weren't possible and the integral test was required. Those questions didn't grind my gears.

And Jon`C is right, they do know the series 1/n^2 converges, that was covered in the beginning section on series.