Re: Con-other

ROGER MILLS wrote:
> Keith Bertelsen wrote:
>> With my pet conlang in the last half of high school, I ended up developing
>> the mathematical notation (they used hexadecimal!) system long before I
>> even had a functional grammar.
>>
>> I showed it to one of my math teachers, and she was like "Huh?", and
>> totally didn't understand what I had done, or how I had sixteen numbers.
>> That was about the point where I stopped paying attention in class.
>>
> That's really sad. Shame on her!! My education in math wasn't the greatest;
> I guess by high school I'd heard of duodecimal, but had no idea how you
> worked in it. Then in the 60s, at my second try at college, one of the
> required courses was "Intro to Math"-- Morris Kline's "New Math" was the fad
> then, and it turned out to be a fascinating course. At least I still
> remember our other base systems work and why...:-))) though the various
> converters online help out.
I learnt how to do stuff in other bases by reading an encyclopedia in
primary school --- this would've been about 6 or 7 AV (i.e. ante
vicipaediam). Somehow I've managed never to have forgotten what I'd
learnt then, even before I had to learn it again in University for
discrete maths.

As for maths teachers, I had the best on in year eleven. The class
structure was far from the best --- often beginning with just copying
down stuff from the blackboard --- but his attitude and knowledge more
than made up for it. And in any case, copying is only boring if you
don't pay attention to what you're reading and don't enjoy handwriting
for its own sake. For most of highschool I began the year with a decent
teacher who for whatever reason left partway through (e.g. one retired,
one disappeared off the face of the planet) and was replaced by one who
wasn't as good.


--
Tristan.