Connections

In high school, my teachers always told me how they all try to work together to connect all the subjects and I just didn’t see that. How in the world does Hamlet connect to the velocity of a train? Or even chemistry with math, I mean you use math in chemistry, but nothing more than multiplication. And then there’s calculus. I hated calculus with the passion of a thousand burning suns and it is one of the reasons why I am not in engineering right now. I despised Newton for ever thinking of calculus and wished that apple never fell on his head. I felt like, in real life, if I want to know how long it will take a potato to go from room temperature to x degrees  in an oven set to y degrees, I will wait for the stupid potato to warm up! But now as a “wiser” university student, I see how various courses are related.

• PHYS 100 and calculus – We had a clicker question about if a car has a linear position-vs-time graph and if a train has a what looked like a log position-vs-time graph and they intersected twice, then do they ever have the same velocity? I looked at it and just remembered what I believe was the mean value theorem where f(x) and g(x) are continuous on the closed interval [a, b] and differentiable on the open interval (a, b) then there is a c on (a, b) where the derivatives of f(x) and g(x) are the same. Or something along those lines. Either way, I looked at the graph and just saw that theorem, whatever it was, pop in my head and all those people who didn’t know it had to think about it for a long time.

• PSYC 100 and art – This one is a really odd one for me to talk about. I took an introductory course in visual art in high school and I thought I would never use it again outside of drawing on calculus AP test review questions. In the last section in PSYC 100, we learned about the various brain structures and he would often put pictures of them up on the projector and I drew them quite well in my notes given the short amount of time before he moved on, which I can fully thank last year’s art class for.

• PHYS 100, CHEM 111, PSYC 100, and EOSC 114 – Not as exciting, but I found it interesting that in four out of my five classes we ended up talking in some depth about waves, mostly light waves, some sound waves, and some actual waves (the kind in the ocean).

• ENGL 110 and Monty Python and the Holy Grail – Surprisingly, this one is not incidental, he has done it on several different occasions. Since each ENGL 110 class is different, I can’t exactly recommend watching the movie for the class, but it is a lovely movie nonetheless. Today he referenced the part where the bridgekeeper asked them three questions: What is your name? What is your quest? What is your favourite colour? and it surprisingly was entirely relevant to what we were talking about.