November 2014 Monthly Bragging Thread

elharo

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

In any reasonable class, the score should have exceeded 100%.

Perhaps in any ordinary class at a North American institution. But I don't think such grading schemes are reasonable -- there's more to reach for (and more humility, and much finer discrimination) when 80% is difficult to achieve.

Yeah, bearing in mind that the mapping from percentage scores to letter grades or the equivalent is pretty much arbitrary, I much prefer systems where some of the problems presented are really hard and the grade boundaries placed correspondingly lower. It allows for more ambition and more flexibility, and perhaps more importantly it's just more interesting than a system where you get a perfect score if you don't screw up each of twenty virtually identical basic exercises. I still have fond memories of a high-school physics class where I once earned an A ... (read more)

4zedzed12y

Well, yes, but in my judgement, OP has at least reached the point where marginal skill at algebra won't translate into marginal gains in things OP's interested in. In particular, learning algebra is a means to an end, and that end is calculus. That requires being good enough to not be limited by sketchy knowledge of algebra when you get to calculus, not being good enough to ace the AMC10 (warning: nerd snipe). I've updated my comment to reflect that getting all the way to AMC10-acing levels is a poor use of time, and were I running the class, I wouldn't encourage it. (On the other hand, if you're under the age of 16 and have talent for math, then getting to AMC-acing levels of algebra is a fine use of your time. If you plan on attending university in America, I'm given to understand that the elite universities you're going to want to gain admissions to take AMC scores because they have so many indistinguishable SAT-math scores. Even if not, getting that good at algebra may be a good use of your time if it means you can have high scores in math competitions to your name. If that's not true, then your time is probably better spent reading, say, Spivak or something like 6.042J (for anyone interested, read the first 4 chapters of the 6.042J text, then Spivak, then the rest of 6.042J. And (this should go without saying), watch the lectures and do the problem sets. One does not simply get good at math without a ridiculous amount of practice.))