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<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8543324" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Yeah, it’s been many years at this point, but I vaguely recall understanding at the time what Sine, Cosine and Tangent were for and what their relationships to the angles and sides was. the problem was…This. The the part where the function “takes in one thing and spits out another thing.” I never understood what it was doing to get the output from that input. I can accept that it does and use it in the right contexts to find the right answer, but if I don’t understand what’s happening “under the hood” so to speak, it’s not really going to mean anything to me.Funny enough, the apparent pointlessness of it was never my problem with it. I understood and was fine with the idea that it was sort of a building block of physics, plus I’ve never been one to balk at learning for its own sake. It’s enough to me that something is interesting, even if I don’t have an immediate practical use for it. But I lost interest because I never got a satisfactory answer to what was actually going on inside the magic box that transformed the inputs into the outputs. It stopped being interesting because I couldn’t understand what made it tick. And at this point it’s been too long, to build that understanding I would need to revisit the subject basically from scratch. I would also need a teacher who themselves intimately understood what the functions do and why, and had both the communication skills and the patience to walk me through that.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 8543324, member: 6779196"] Yeah, it’s been many years at this point, but I vaguely recall understanding at the time what Sine, Cosine and Tangent were [I]for[/I] and what their relationships to the angles and sides was. the problem was… [I]This[/I]. The the part where the function “takes in one thing and spits out another thing.” I never understood [I]what it was doing[/I] to get the output from that input. I can accept [I]that[/I] it does and use it in the right contexts to find the right answer, but if I don’t understand what’s happening “under the hood” so to speak, it’s not really going to mean anything to me. Funny enough, the apparent pointlessness of it was never my problem with it. I understood and was fine with the idea that it was sort of a building block of physics, plus I’ve never been one to balk at learning for its own sake. It’s enough to me that something is interesting, even if I don’t have an immediate practical use for it. But I lost interest because I never got a satisfactory answer to what was actually going on inside the magic box that transformed the inputs into the outputs. It stopped being interesting because I couldn’t understand what made it tick. And at this point it’s been too long, to build that understanding I would need to revisit the subject basically from scratch. I would also need a teacher who themselves intimately understood what the functions do and why, and had both the communication skills and the patience to walk me through that. [/QUOTE]

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