robert casey wrote:

Teaching vectors to people who have had no math higher than basic
algebra was quite a challenge.


I can remember the first time vectors and such came up in math class. I
got hung up with the names they gave numbers that had "i (square root of
-1)" in them. "imaginary". To me "imaginary" = "fake", so why would
you talk about fake numbers in a math class? If this was English Lit
class, then sure, anything goes there, but not in math class.... You'll
probably run into things like this, and have no idea what the problem is
when you do the teaching.

-1 is quite real, it is the square root of it that sets off those
imaginations. Especially, when one views fractals and one imagines that
nature makes use of it's sq. root rather nicely ...

Regards,
JS