I've been asked by my brother for help on a math problem (find a tangent to a given function that passes through a given point), and he has the unfortunate tendency to nod and say "okay" regardless of whether he understood anything I just said or not. Worse is that, since recently, when I explicitly ask him later whether he understood anything, he now always says "yes" instead of admitting he didn't listen, even though I can see his eyes glaze over
every fucking moment I inhale to begin explaining something, and he is utterly unable to solve the same problem when I change a single number of it. Note that I have absolutely no lack of explanatory capabilities, it's simply that he just
switches his brain off every time I begin talking. So after I solved a problem for him and he said thanks and left, he immediately went to our mother and asked her for the solution to the same problem, which I ended up
having to explain to her as well, and then to my brother a second time. In the process of doing that, I found out the exact part where he had problems, namely that he has no single clue what a function is and how it works, which is a truly horrible lack of knowledge, especially considering that study of functions was the main topic of his math class for the last
half a fucking year. Now I wanted to fix this lack of knowledge by explaining to him how a function works, and I began this by saying "Let me explain to you how a function works". He told me that he knew that already, but if so, he wouldn't have gotten stuck where he got stuck (he was given f(x) := x²-3, but he had no idea how to find out what f(u) was). So I explained to him that he didn't know that and proceeded to inhale for an explanation, when he (figuratively) stuck his fingers in his ears and said "LA LA I DON'T WANT TO KNOW THAT BECAUSE YOU'RE ONLY GOING TO CONFUSE ME", even though it's literally just "replace all x's in the definition with the given argument", which can further be simplified
like this with the help of an index finger and a sheet of paper. My mother overheard that and told me that I needed to explain to him how that step works
without explaining how a function works, which you may realize to be impossible (since that step is in fact function application) as well as counterproductive (since he actually needs to know how a function works). I proceeded to state exactly that multiple times, but nobody believed me, my brother used that as an excuse to get mad at me (which itself is an excuse to not have to listen to me anymore) and my mother (who is normally very logical, reasonable and math-savvy) started crying, which made my stepfather (who mentally operates only on the emotional plane, kinda like how a dog doesn't know what you're talking about, yet gets totally upset when someone is sad) look at me like I was the biggest asshole that had ever disgraced his field of vision. Then we had dinner, and the level of uncomfortability at the table was friggin' tangible.
Dammit people, why won't you let me educate you.
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3749126 times)