Physics Woes

[teyla]

I've been studying physics, because I've got an exam tomorrow at 6.30pm (weirdest time ever for an exam y/y?). I love physics, but this...

I've got a page of formulas lying next to me. Stuff like v=lambda*f, and q=n*e. Very, very basic stuff. The sort of stuff that you happily forgot in grade ten the minute they told you you were allowed to use a formulary from now on.

I'm not saying those formulas are hard to memorize. They aren't. But if you have ten or twenty of these little three-letter-combinations memorized, it's very easy to get confused. And that, dear uni, is why God gave us formularies. C'mon, I was allowed to use one in school! I thought uni was supposed to be more about understanding things and getting to the bottom of them than school.

I myself don't call making people memorize twenty three-letter-combinations 'getting to the bottom of things'.

The joke is - if you haven't understood what you're doing, you can't use a formulary. You won't know what to look up. I know this from experience. It's perfectly possible to flunk a physics exam even with a formulary.

Next thing they won't allow calculators anymore, and will give us a list of angles and their sinus values to memorize. I really wouldn't be surprised.

Comments

[housepiglet.livejournal.com]

Ugh :( I've not used a formulary, having studied no science *g*, but I u/st the problem. It's like the courses I once studied where we were expected to remember by rote vast tracts of black-letter law. People put tons of time into learning the words of the statutes: time that could have been much better invested in trying to understand the underlying principles. When I got to Bar School we were allowed to take a statute book into the exam, and--as with your formularly--it would have been of virtually no use to anyone who hadn't swotted for the exam. Doh...

I hope the exam was okay in the end, despite the idiocy.

(Every time I see your icon I find myself thinking 'oyster'. Then I actually look and realise it isn't. What is it, though?)

[teyla]

/o\ Randomly making people memorize stuff = fail. I mean, there's a reason things like formularies/statute books were written. Gah.

The exam was more or less okay. As I told wihluta, though, it would have gone better if I'd had my formulary xP.

Hah, oyster. Not quite ;D. Do you know this painting?



That's what I used as a basis. There's this quote from a Doctor Who episode where the Doctor tries to explain time:

Time isn't what people think it is. It's complicated, very complicated. People assume time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but from a non-subjective, non-linear viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey... stuff.

That's where the caption comes from. My journal layout is based on this painting/quote, too ;).

[housepiglet.livejournal.com]

Ahaa! I'd wondered about teh caption. Nice painting! I've not come across it before. It makes a great icon. I like the way you've adjusted the colouring :)

[teyla]

:D Thanks! Glad you like it.