galadhir replied to your
Sep. 8th, 2016 01:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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galadhir replied to your post “danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”
We are seriously brain twins. I had all of those problems too. I was ace at physics until it started being expressed with maths, but maths has always been impenetrable to me. As has music theory. OTOH, I also sew by eye and play/learn music by ear. I get very angry when people expect me to do it ‘correctly’ because if I try that I can’t do it at all. But if I do it my own way, I’m fine. And I’m resigned now to the fact that I’ll never be an astronaut.
Yes! I can play/sing nearly any music by ear having heard it only once or twice, which actually has hindered me a lot in Srs Music– I can read music but I basically have zero practice doing so once I’ve heard the whole piece played through, and it’s really hard for me to sight-read because of that. I would go through whole concerts without opening the folder on my music stand because I didn’t have to. (In the woodwind quintet I played bass clarinet in, there was notably one Mozart piece where I played C in quarter notes, four to a measure, for the entire piece, so that was understandable, but normally I didn’t have *quite* such monotonous parts. I didn’t mind, though!)
And actually I blew pretty much the only cool audition I ever had, because I couldn’t sightread for shit. The deck was stacked against me; I was a River Campus student and I didn’t know the Eastman School people hated the River dilettantes, as they thought of us; strike two was that I didn’t understand the bus schedule and had to reschedule my audition at the last minute, and strike three was that my previous singing teacher had taught me a mispronounced word in the aria I performed. I knew right away that I hadn’t gotten it; my attempts at small talk before the audition were rebuffed, and the only feedback they gave me was to correct the word I’d mispronounced. (I don’t remember which word. I know it was that I pronounced it like Spanish instead of Italian. I also know my small-town teacher taught it to me that way.) (Interestingly, in that youtube video, which is a Russian teenage girl, there are commenters critiquing her pronunciation. COME ON PEOPLE.)
I haven’t actually performed since, now that I think of it! Except a few folk sessions, but those aren’t– performances, per se. Oh, except the time I sang the national anthem in front of 1200 people, they started playing music after I started so I had to stop and ask them to cut it and start over on way too high a note flustered as hell, and didn’t know a woman dressed as a dominatrix was pretending to conduct the whole thing behind me with a riding crop. (I do remember the experience fondly, mostly? but the video exists on youtube and i sound like a dying cow.)
(It was after that that I decided to learn the Canadian anthem and do that one instead because it’s much, much kinder and meant for humans to sing.)
I can’t do cross-stitch because you have to count, but I can do free embroidery about as easily as painting, with or without a hoop. And I’m quite good, despite my relative lack of physical coordination, at things like pool, or baseball, or bocce, where you have to apply force and mentally calculate angles and stuff, because I can see how it will work out. Sometimes I don’t have the coordination, but I’m very good at knowing which direction something will move when hit.
But I wouldn’t ever be able to do any of the math underlying it.
torrilin replied to your post“danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”
Ok, so you have your rectangle of fabric for a tunic sleeve or whatever. And it’s a thing, so it can be measured and it will be fairly consistent. An algebraic function is A math way of talking about one of your rectangle’s edges. There’s other math ways to talk about your rectangle, thus A way and not the way. There’s in fact a whole shitload of ways. But at its core, algebra functions are about lines and different ways to describe them. which sounds stupidly abstract.
Like. I get that it’s lines. But. Why is it lines and why are they over there? And, what really gets me, why do we have to calculate this line if we know how it’s shaped and know the two points it’s connecting? Can’t we just draw it and then measure? NO of course not, there has to be numbers or it’s not real, only numbers are real, shapes aren’t real. I get so grouchy about this. Geometry made sense because it was describing real things. Algebra never connected to anything that actually existed anywhere observable in any shape that could be described– which I guess is why we had to graph it, because it wasn’t real and couldn’t be otherwise described, but seriously. It’s a line that comes in from the top, jogs, and goes off the bottom. There’s your function. Why is it like that? No one could ever explain. It just is. I can’t relate to this and I can’t figure out how to connect it to any of the neural pathways I actually have. So. As @galadhir said, I’ll never be an astronaut. At least I can write about them if I want.
danceswchopstck replied to your post“danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”
Owwwww. My sympathies. The miserable part of school for me was team sports. I’m guessing I should extrapolate to a much higher level of horribleness for math.
The thing about team sports is that it’s just People + Physical Coordination, which weren’t my strong suit but at least were in a language I understood. Kind of like if today’s instruction booklet contained the line “hit yourself in the face”, and I look around and everyone else is hitting themselves in the face. Welp. Fuck it. I mean, I’m not psyched about this, but if that’s what’s today’s agenda and we’re getting marks for this, I guess. *slaps self* Unpleasant, but survivable.
Later in life I got better at team sports.
awisekraken replied to your post “danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”
<3
<3 <3 <3 <3 !!!
galadhir replied to your post “danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”
We are seriously brain twins. I had all of those problems too. I was ace at physics until it started being expressed with maths, but maths has always been impenetrable to me. As has music theory. OTOH, I also sew by eye and play/learn music by ear. I get very angry when people expect me to do it ‘correctly’ because if I try that I can’t do it at all. But if I do it my own way, I’m fine. And I’m resigned now to the fact that I’ll never be an astronaut.
Yes! I can play/sing nearly any music by ear having heard it only once or twice, which actually has hindered me a lot in Srs Music– I can read music but I basically have zero practice doing so once I’ve heard the whole piece played through, and it’s really hard for me to sight-read because of that. I would go through whole concerts without opening the folder on my music stand because I didn’t have to. (In the woodwind quintet I played bass clarinet in, there was notably one Mozart piece where I played C in quarter notes, four to a measure, for the entire piece, so that was understandable, but normally I didn’t have *quite* such monotonous parts. I didn’t mind, though!)
And actually I blew pretty much the only cool audition I ever had, because I couldn’t sightread for shit. The deck was stacked against me; I was a River Campus student and I didn’t know the Eastman School people hated the River dilettantes, as they thought of us; strike two was that I didn’t understand the bus schedule and had to reschedule my audition at the last minute, and strike three was that my previous singing teacher had taught me a mispronounced word in the aria I performed. I knew right away that I hadn’t gotten it; my attempts at small talk before the audition were rebuffed, and the only feedback they gave me was to correct the word I’d mispronounced. (I don’t remember which word. I know it was that I pronounced it like Spanish instead of Italian. I also know my small-town teacher taught it to me that way.) (Interestingly, in that youtube video, which is a Russian teenage girl, there are commenters critiquing her pronunciation. COME ON PEOPLE.)
I haven’t actually performed since, now that I think of it! Except a few folk sessions, but those aren’t– performances, per se. Oh, except the time I sang the national anthem in front of 1200 people, they started playing music after I started so I had to stop and ask them to cut it and start over on way too high a note flustered as hell, and didn’t know a woman dressed as a dominatrix was pretending to conduct the whole thing behind me with a riding crop. (I do remember the experience fondly, mostly? but the video exists on youtube and i sound like a dying cow.)
(It was after that that I decided to learn the Canadian anthem and do that one instead because it’s much, much kinder and meant for humans to sing.)
I can’t do cross-stitch because you have to count, but I can do free embroidery about as easily as painting, with or without a hoop. And I’m quite good, despite my relative lack of physical coordination, at things like pool, or baseball, or bocce, where you have to apply force and mentally calculate angles and stuff, because I can see how it will work out. Sometimes I don’t have the coordination, but I’m very good at knowing which direction something will move when hit.
But I wouldn’t ever be able to do any of the math underlying it.
torrilin replied to your post“danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”
Ok, so you have your rectangle of fabric for a tunic sleeve or whatever. And it’s a thing, so it can be measured and it will be fairly consistent. An algebraic function is A math way of talking about one of your rectangle’s edges. There’s other math ways to talk about your rectangle, thus A way and not the way. There’s in fact a whole shitload of ways. But at its core, algebra functions are about lines and different ways to describe them. which sounds stupidly abstract.
Like. I get that it’s lines. But. Why is it lines and why are they over there? And, what really gets me, why do we have to calculate this line if we know how it’s shaped and know the two points it’s connecting? Can’t we just draw it and then measure? NO of course not, there has to be numbers or it’s not real, only numbers are real, shapes aren’t real. I get so grouchy about this. Geometry made sense because it was describing real things. Algebra never connected to anything that actually existed anywhere observable in any shape that could be described– which I guess is why we had to graph it, because it wasn’t real and couldn’t be otherwise described, but seriously. It’s a line that comes in from the top, jogs, and goes off the bottom. There’s your function. Why is it like that? No one could ever explain. It just is. I can’t relate to this and I can’t figure out how to connect it to any of the neural pathways I actually have. So. As @galadhir said, I’ll never be an astronaut. At least I can write about them if I want.
danceswchopstck replied to your post“danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”
Owwwww. My sympathies. The miserable part of school for me was team sports. I’m guessing I should extrapolate to a much higher level of horribleness for math.
The thing about team sports is that it’s just People + Physical Coordination, which weren’t my strong suit but at least were in a language I understood. Kind of like if today’s instruction booklet contained the line “hit yourself in the face”, and I look around and everyone else is hitting themselves in the face. Welp. Fuck it. I mean, I’m not psyched about this, but if that’s what’s today’s agenda and we’re getting marks for this, I guess. *slaps self* Unpleasant, but survivable.
Later in life I got better at team sports.
awisekraken replied to your post “danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”
<3
<3 <3 <3 <3 !!!
