what is it about physics that makes me want to cry? i can go on and on about bilabial fricatives in spanish or allophonic variations of inflectional morphemes or predicate adjectives in chinese or the reduplicate copula phenomenon in english ("the thing is, is that....") but the second you ask me to find mass per unit length of a string if the string is one octave higher than another string, i just break down into tears. how do i DO this, there's so many formulas how do i know which one, oh that and i don't know basic algebra, and kaley just crumples.
so i got two problems (at least there's only six), one easily within seconds and the other struggling for hours with my boyfriend's help, and i'm going in to my professor's office hours tomorrow just hours before the homework is due to beg for help.
i just feel like nothing we talk about in class, nothing i have notes on, relates in any way to the problems for homework this week. i feel pretty solid about what we went over in lecture, then i saw the problems on the homework and was like 'how is this possibly this week's homework?'
blah blah blah bitch bitch bitch. i am not a science person. or a math person. i got through the lowert possible levels of high-school math (okay, BARELY) with intuition and guesswork and the fact that my teachers thought i was smart but unmovitated and gave me credit for trying.
i just hope i don't walk into my physics test on tuesday and break down in tears looking at the problems.
i kinda think i might.
yeah. no interesting stories or anecdotes. no funny/cool picture. i' m just frustrated.
at least physics makes my chinese homework look pshhh eaaaaaasy, and cleaning the kitchen seem AWESOME!
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2 comments:
There's a ton about this post that I love.
I took my fair share of physics classes at CU (I don't know if you know this, but I was an astronomy major and did astrophysics for a few semesters (but the physics part sucked so hard that I eventually changed to the general astro track (aka the you're-never-going-to-get-a-job track))), and every single one was exactly like you described.
The answers to the problems they give you are NEVER in the book. You could read it cover to cover and be no closer to figuring out how to solve them. They expect you to "extrapolate" information and formulate your own equations based on what little they actually do give you and your alleged knowledge/skillz. Eff that.
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By the way, do you know why "stupider" isn't a word? I feel like anything that's more than something else is "-er" it (did that make sense?). I was talking to Jess Goulart and she thought it was because of the consonant sound at the end of the root word, but "warmer" (an a million other examples) work just fine. So that theory's debunked.
I've been trying to figure that out lately, and you seem to be the person to ask with all your reduplicate copula phenomenons and such.
hehe. i like that my short whiny post was one that you loved.
and SERIOUSLY, what is it about physics classes that makes them like that??? i'm really happy to hear that it's not just me. : ) thanks.
stupider IS a word! and yes, "anything that's more than anything else is -er" totally makes sense. because English has a system for creating superlatives (e.g. big, biggER, biggEST) where we tack on -er and -est/ist. apparently someone decided that 2-syllable words, like 'stupid' should be superlativeized (that is not word =P) with "more" and not "-er" but that doesn't really make any sense. because "happy," "silly," "cranky" are all 2-syllable word and we don't say "more happy" or "most happy," we say "happier" so there's basically no rule or reason whatsoever that anyone should ever say that 'stupider' is not a word. might sound bad to some people who are really strict grammarians. but basically any word that a native speaker of a language can create (e.g. going noun to verb like i did with superlative --> superlativize) is totally valid. and basically "stupider" is a fine english word created with the same system we use to indicate more-ness with any other word (except really long words, like "intelligent"). and it has nothing to do with the phonemic theory jess suggested =P
in case you were wondering, we probably say "more intelligent" instead of "intelligenter" because at that point we are taking on an extra syllable (-er) at the end, making it a reaaaally long word instead of putting a new word in front, which is a little more reasonable since english likes, usually, to have separate words for separate concepts (not all languages do this!) anyway i won't go into isolating versus agglutinating languages but god i would love to.=P
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