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Comment by Cobord | Hacker News Reader

The algorithms you would learn for graphs etc are also just math and equally abstract. What makes the difference in how real you treat the two concepts that are both abstract but generally applicable?

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Not the OP, but I've had good and bad math teachers. The bad ones tend to teach rote steps, "do this, do this, do this, done," without any attempt to explain why things work the way they do, without drawing parallels to already-learned things, without trying to teach any _why_.

Then you hear students asking, "when am I ever going to use this?"

My good teachers, on the other hand, always tied what we were doing into a larger scheme. If there were similarities or other relations between concepts, they'd be pointed out. If someone wasn't 'getting it', they had other ways of looking at it at hand, would sometimes give alternate methods of doing the same thing, etc.

In short, one tells you to memorize in a vacuum for no good reason. The other helps you learn.

This has a huge impact for me.

I didn't get calculus. It was a disaster for me.

Now I'm a mathematical epidemiologist. Why? Because someone introduced me to the grander scheme of things.

But I would think the same applies to your algorithms teacher. There should be just as many good and bad ones there. Yet it seems different level of what is counted as too rote and unusable.

Depends on how they're taught, but to be honest, at a certain point in algorithms class, the subject matter also became tedious and abstract beyond recognition.

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