Screaming

Why do I find myself wanting to -scream- in calc class?
B/c I'm frustrated:
- the material isn't that hard
- it's quite beautiful
- and I -can- convey it if
  I had a good book (and some individual time)
  ...and if students had a good education up to then.
...but I can't convey it given the materials.

- I'm fighting the system
  + the student have been taught terribly,
    so they need to be (re/de)-programmed
    
  + the book sucks
    It makes everything hard,
    it's disorganized, it's arbitrary,
    it's verbose,
    it doesn't teach how to actually do the problems
    (this applies to all the books).

  + ...but lectures are close to useless
    Books are -much- easier to learn from than lecture notes.
    Thus students learn from an awful book before they learn from a
    brilliant instructor (I'm not saying that I'm wonderful, but even
    if I were, it wouldn't do any good).

    You honestly cannot get through in lecture.
    You can say something -exactly-,
    you can walk students through a problem,
    and they won't be able to do -exactly that problem,
    with their notes/solution in front of them-.
  
  + there's no book that I can refer them to:
    it's not just that this book sucks, but that -all- books suck

  + the HW and the book both reinforce the -bad- POVs
    and the -bad- techniques and -confuse- students.
 
How students react:
- students are themselves frustrated
  b/c of the war between teacher and book

- students don't distinguish between a -subject- and how it's -taught-
  If they had a good teacher, they like the subject;
  if it's taught poorly, the subject sucks.
  It's worse in math: b/c -all- the intro books suck,
    there's nothing you can show students to show them that the
    subject actually is cool -- except for slowly working them through
    it.

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There's a certain obnoxious coyness in calc books:
all they actually want is for students to do the manipulations,
but they have all this verbiage.
It's a facade, a charade.
[A classic example is asking:
 "What is the domain of this function: 1/(x^2-3x+2)"
 ...instead of saying:
 "For which x does this -formula- work: 1/(x^2-3x+2)"]
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- the easy way is to teach them what the book wants,
  the way the book wants.
  What students will learn is:
  + math is just a collection of formulae
  + it's pointless and frustrating (b/c the book doesn't tell you)
  + ...but they'll be happy that it's familiar and undemanding

- the way I teach,
  + some students will -get- it
    will understand that there's something there,
      that they can -think-!
    ...which is valuable; teaching formulae is next-to-worthless

  + some students won't,
    and will simply be frustrated.
    Ideally, I'd have enough time and skills to win over all these
    students (or they would have enough sense/brain/energy to actually
    pay listen to me and learn)

    These students will whine.
    It's partly my failure for not winning them over,
    but it's far more their failure for not learning.
[This is exactly the trickiest point of agency:
 they're not yet their own people, still so influenced by their early
 schooling -- so it's partly their fault, partly their teachers'
 faults.]
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This is a key reason I don't want to be a professor:
teaching will always be endlessly frustrating,
a charade.