When I moved from teaching college to high school (best decision ever, by the way) I assumed everyone in the HS math department would use LaTeX and overleaf.
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RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/116525530358581582
When I moved from teaching college to high school (best decision ever, by the way) I assumed everyone in the HS math department would use LaTeX and overleaf. And for some reason several people were intimidated by me (I think being in a college environment had caused me to project a certain ominous math aura as a matter of self preservation) so no one wanted to tell me they had no idea what LaTeX or overleaf was.
HS teachers math use word, and I have seen some horrors ... My god.
The math teachers at the HS had developed all of this wonderful material for teaching. But it's all in Word and Google docs. I've learned to work with it, and I've taught a few people a little LaTeX.
After the rough first months people stopped being intimidated and now we all get on great.
I still dream of getting all those documents converted, though...
someday...
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RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/116525530358581582
When I moved from teaching college to high school (best decision ever, by the way) I assumed everyone in the HS math department would use LaTeX and overleaf. And for some reason several people were intimidated by me (I think being in a college environment had caused me to project a certain ominous math aura as a matter of self preservation) so no one wanted to tell me they had no idea what LaTeX or overleaf was.
HS teachers math use word, and I have seen some horrors ... My god.
@futurebird fairly sure my math lecturer in an IT used word for his equations. half expecting latex myself aswell ye
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RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/116525530358581582
When I moved from teaching college to high school (best decision ever, by the way) I assumed everyone in the HS math department would use LaTeX and overleaf. And for some reason several people were intimidated by me (I think being in a college environment had caused me to project a certain ominous math aura as a matter of self preservation) so no one wanted to tell me they had no idea what LaTeX or overleaf was.
HS teachers math use word, and I have seen some horrors ... My god.
@futurebird I had a maths-for-computer-scientists professor at the university whose lectures involved him writing the material he was teaching live, with felt pens, on overhead foil as it was lying on the projector...
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@futurebird I had a maths-for-computer-scientists professor at the university whose lectures involved him writing the material he was teaching live, with felt pens, on overhead foil as it was lying on the projector...
@futurebird A fellow student in my year actually typeset the copied-by-hand stuff in LaTeX and made it available for everyone.
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The math teachers at the HS had developed all of this wonderful material for teaching. But it's all in Word and Google docs. I've learned to work with it, and I've taught a few people a little LaTeX.
After the rough first months people stopped being intimidated and now we all get on great.
I still dream of getting all those documents converted, though...
someday...
I'm remembering sending an email to another teacher with a possible set of problems with a calc test. I just sent the *.tex file with a little note "I compile them in overleaf, lazy I know" the teacher had no idea how to open it, or why I thought they might be lazy.
I thought "of course they all have LaTeX installed on desktop and use the command line... I hope they don't look down on me for using a web app"
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RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/116525530358581582
When I moved from teaching college to high school (best decision ever, by the way) I assumed everyone in the HS math department would use LaTeX and overleaf. And for some reason several people were intimidated by me (I think being in a college environment had caused me to project a certain ominous math aura as a matter of self preservation) so no one wanted to tell me they had no idea what LaTeX or overleaf was.
HS teachers math use word, and I have seen some horrors ... My god.
@futurebird Our HS teacher used Wolfram Mathematica. But he was also a huge nerd… on a nerd (IT) school… so…
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@futurebird A fellow student in my year actually typeset the copied-by-hand stuff in LaTeX and made it available for everyone.
@anke @futurebird hero!
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I'm remembering sending an email to another teacher with a possible set of problems with a calc test. I just sent the *.tex file with a little note "I compile them in overleaf, lazy I know" the teacher had no idea how to open it, or why I thought they might be lazy.
I thought "of course they all have LaTeX installed on desktop and use the command line... I hope they don't look down on me for using a web app"
@futurebird You might take a look at Typst (free software, I'm an enthusiastic user only), which feels to me as a long-term TeX user very like a more modern approach to the same problem. The document is similarly compiled from source files rather than WYSIWYG, but it deals with actual TrueType fonts, handles utf-8 cleanly, has a sensible built-in programming language rather than macros, etc. Web app or local compilation. Solid mathematical support too.
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The math teachers at the HS had developed all of this wonderful material for teaching. But it's all in Word and Google docs. I've learned to work with it, and I've taught a few people a little LaTeX.
After the rough first months people stopped being intimidated and now we all get on great.
I still dream of getting all those documents converted, though...
someday...
The big thing that made me prefer StarOffice (which later became OpenOffice) to MS Office was the equation editor. In MS Office, it was an entirely point-and-click thing. In StarOffice, it had this, but that also built up a plain-text serialisation, which was much easier to edit and enter quickly.
I later learned LaTeX and discovered that, aside from a different escape character, they both used the same AMS markup for equations, so everything I'd learned in StarOffice was immediately transferrable.
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RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/116525530358581582
When I moved from teaching college to high school (best decision ever, by the way) I assumed everyone in the HS math department would use LaTeX and overleaf. And for some reason several people were intimidated by me (I think being in a college environment had caused me to project a certain ominous math aura as a matter of self preservation) so no one wanted to tell me they had no idea what LaTeX or overleaf was.
HS teachers math use word, and I have seen some horrors ... My god.
@futurebird I remember the embarassed looks when i defended my specialty memoir at the faculty of medicine.
Latex, zotero, R 'bug in your head'.Could not see why they preferred paying licence fees.
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I'm remembering sending an email to another teacher with a possible set of problems with a calc test. I just sent the *.tex file with a little note "I compile them in overleaf, lazy I know" the teacher had no idea how to open it, or why I thought they might be lazy.
I thought "of course they all have LaTeX installed on desktop and use the command line... I hope they don't look down on me for using a web app"
@futurebird
And on the other side of the spectrum, I had a CS teacher that provided lecture notes on the web, and all the math expressions were in unrendered latex source form, \sum{\fraq etc. This was second/third year university CS here though, so it was mostly correct. -
RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/116525530358581582
When I moved from teaching college to high school (best decision ever, by the way) I assumed everyone in the HS math department would use LaTeX and overleaf. And for some reason several people were intimidated by me (I think being in a college environment had caused me to project a certain ominous math aura as a matter of self preservation) so no one wanted to tell me they had no idea what LaTeX or overleaf was.
HS teachers math use word, and I have seen some horrors ... My god.
-
I'm remembering sending an email to another teacher with a possible set of problems with a calc test. I just sent the *.tex file with a little note "I compile them in overleaf, lazy I know" the teacher had no idea how to open it, or why I thought they might be lazy.
I thought "of course they all have LaTeX installed on desktop and use the command line... I hope they don't look down on me for using a web app"
@futurebird
LaTeX has come a long way in 40 years since I started with the 5th edition in ‘86. Lucky for me math.utah.edu needed help. I did part time remote work ‘91-‘03.
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@futurebird
LaTeX has come a long way in 40 years since I started with the 5th edition in ‘86. Lucky for me math.utah.edu needed help. I did part time remote work ‘91-‘03.I love LaTeX so much and still want to win the world over. When I taught college everyone used it exclusively. It was just the culture.
Now I have a google doc, converted from word and the diagrams are from old scans of worksheets from the 80s.
It's wild!
I got into making LaTeX math problem sets that would automatically generate with unique numbers and diagrams and put the solutions at the end. That was so much fun, and they still use my system back at the college.
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I love LaTeX so much and still want to win the world over. When I taught college everyone used it exclusively. It was just the culture.
Now I have a google doc, converted from word and the diagrams are from old scans of worksheets from the 80s.
It's wild!
I got into making LaTeX math problem sets that would automatically generate with unique numbers and diagrams and put the solutions at the end. That was so much fun, and they still use my system back at the college.
@futurebird
I’m amazed that you can draw an equation with a crayon, take a pic of it and have it converted to LaTeX with a click. -
The big thing that made me prefer StarOffice (which later became OpenOffice) to MS Office was the equation editor. In MS Office, it was an entirely point-and-click thing. In StarOffice, it had this, but that also built up a plain-text serialisation, which was much easier to edit and enter quickly.
I later learned LaTeX and discovered that, aside from a different escape character, they both used the same AMS markup for equations, so everything I'd learned in StarOffice was immediately transferrable.
@david_chisnall @futurebird by at least Word 2013 they added the ability to type in some form of markup, but it’s not the same type and —my memories are hazy—may or may not have converted to objects or whatever pretty greedily, so that you were back to WYSIWYG if you wanted to make changes.
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The math teachers at the HS had developed all of this wonderful material for teaching. But it's all in Word and Google docs. I've learned to work with it, and I've taught a few people a little LaTeX.
After the rough first months people stopped being intimidated and now we all get on great.
I still dream of getting all those documents converted, though...
someday...
@futurebird I feel like it would be nice in corporate environments as well. When branding comes out with a new template, you just drop it in source control and rebuild. Also, documents become more easily controlled, use whatever free SCM you like instead of paying for some enterprise document repository.
But I also admit that I just like converting problems into code/text because that’s what I like working with and if I can map problems into that space, well “when you’re a coder, every problem looks like code.”**this is not true. Not all problems are code; probably most are not. It takes practice to recognize when to back away from the technical bits of a sociotechnical problem and just say, “We will agree not to do this thing because it rapidly gets too complicated to maintain and still wouldn’t truly prevent someone who doesn’t care about the agreement.”
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@david_chisnall @futurebird by at least Word 2013 they added the ability to type in some form of markup, but it’s not the same type and —my memories are hazy—may or may not have converted to objects or whatever pretty greedily, so that you were back to WYSIWYG if you wanted to make changes.
@david_chisnall @futurebird oh, and if you went too far back in Word versions, it would revert to rendering the whole equation as an uneditable image, so ‘ware the student group using word to write a report with math.
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The big thing that made me prefer StarOffice (which later became OpenOffice) to MS Office was the equation editor. In MS Office, it was an entirely point-and-click thing. In StarOffice, it had this, but that also built up a plain-text serialisation, which was much easier to edit and enter quickly.
I later learned LaTeX and discovered that, aside from a different escape character, they both used the same AMS markup for equations, so everything I'd learned in StarOffice was immediately transferrable.
@david_chisnall @futurebird in the early aughts, writing design docs when I wanted to throw in the occasional equation I started to use StarOffice. Drove my manager nuts.
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I'm remembering sending an email to another teacher with a possible set of problems with a calc test. I just sent the *.tex file with a little note "I compile them in overleaf, lazy I know" the teacher had no idea how to open it, or why I thought they might be lazy.
I thought "of course they all have LaTeX installed on desktop and use the command line... I hope they don't look down on me for using a web app"
@futurebird as a student, this was me transferring from a department with mostly research-oriented profs to engineering, which has mostly profs from industry. A GOOD NUMBER OF THEM USE FREAKING WORD TO TYPESET LAB DOCUMENTS. IT'S INSANE. The good news is I have successfully converted my lab partners from the last few years to latex (with overleaf, yeah...) latex documents just have that "trust me, I'm a professional" je ne said quoi that TAs love to give high grades to regardless of the content
(For stuff I don't need to collaborate on I like texstudio, though.)
