[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

The simple mechanic of long division. I was sick from school for a couple days, when I came back they'd already gone past the instruction on long division and simply expected me to do the problems, which I couldn't because I couldn't make any sense out of them.

It was years later when I was practicing on my own that I that had an insight -- OH you have to carry the remainder and re-divide into it to get the answer. Very simple, but no one bothered to explain that to me. They just couldn't understand what i wasn't understanding.

Differential equations. Had the worst math teacher ever for LA and DE. I memorized enough to pass the class but did not really understand diff eq. Next semester, we used diff eq in my physics classes with a great professor who explained them beautifully. What form do you think the solution takes? Using an algebraic formula for that form, solve for the unknowns. Tada! If there is a solution, you've just solved a differential equation!

Exponentiation. I don't think it was ever really explained before, instead it was treated like something I should've known.

One day I watched a YouTube video that made the world of difference, then I got it.

Anything math related from before high school, it gets dumbed down too much and once you get the actual way to do it in higher math classes, it made a lot more sense to me.

Physical Chemistry. First semester of first year of university. I couldn't understand anything that our 80+ year old professor was mumbling, and the slides he used were terrible (full of abréviations, diagrams missing steps, etc.) Although I was getting solid grades in all my other courses, I failed the first PhysChem midterm with something like 23%. I resigned myself to my fate and sheepishly told my mom (I was still living home at the time and parents were paying for my studies). She got a mad glint in her eyes, and asked for all the course materials. By next week, she had completely reworked the material and came up with new tables and diagrams to help explain the concepts. I was amazed at how simple it all really was. For example, atomic bonds aren't static but can "wiggle" around in several ways, and we can even calculate fairly easily the amount of energy required for each wiggle.

It's = it is

This is very dumb, but when I was in middle school, my sister explained blow jobs to me. She said you bob your head up and down on the penis, and that you could practice on a hotdog. I did not understand. I thought she meant like nodding bob your head. Like it would be in your mouth, and you would nod and it would hit your tongue, then the roof of your mouth, then your tongue etc. I practiced on a hotdog.

In high school, I learned what she actually meant, like bob your head so it goes in and out. I was a sheltered kid.

When doing a convolution of two curves in time, you flip one of them backwards.

Our shit statistics teacher made it so complicated.

And then one day, next semester, in a lab for signals class, the TA casually said "flip one, so they both start at zero seconds" and half the class started convulsing as an entire semester worth of misunderstood math magically snapped into place.

Lots of engineering teachers, have no business being teachers.

Could of could have should of should have

This was explained to me here on Lemmy last month.

Did you take linear algebra?

Did you ever understand eigenvectors? (I didn't.)

BEHOLD

They could have showed me this video, and saved me quite a lot of time and difficulty.

Class A/B/C in networking. I always wondered why there were classes if you would use a subnetmask regardless.

Took me a while to realize that class notation was only used before sub netmasks were a thing. The best you could do is to ignore them completely.

Networking is a wonderful field where you think you understand it until you look at the parts and realize you had it all wrong.