Learning Strategies
I've been wrestling with fouled up and incommensurable coordinate systems in the TinderWin port this week. This happens every year or two, and I always remind myself how disappointed Mr. McCutcheon would be if he knew I still was flubbing simple conformal mappings and linear algebra.
Moral one: pay attention in school. You never know what you'll need.
Moral two: I've finally broken down and we're trying to clean this up permanently, implementing separate types of objects in each coordinate system. If you try to compare something in map coordinates to something else in global coordinates, the compiler will complain. High time.
Moral three: there's more intellectual meat in school than you might think. See, for example, Larry Davidson's nifty blog, Learning Strategies, an ed-blog that's interesting to people who aren't educators.