Rainbow Dash gets Twilight Sparkle to teach her calculus.
They are so screwed.
Chapters (1)
- Member Since 25th Jun, 2012
- offline last seen Jan 5th, 2020
Bulbasaur
Who, me? I'm just your run-of-the-mill user of FimFiction! No exceptional stories here. I think I hear my word processor calling. Sorry, gotta go!
Bulbasaur
Joined 25th Jun, 2012 ·
Offline
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- naturalbornderpy · 4.3k words · 946 9 · 12k views
- Cold in Gardez · 11k words · 3,244 57 · 82k views
- Naughty_Ranko · 2.7k words · 413 2 · 5k views
- PonyThunder · 4k words · 525 5 · 7.2k views
- AuroraDawn · 10k words · 872 21 · 20k views
- Palm Palette · 4.8k words · 225 3 · 3k views
- Shire Folk · 5.1k words · 328 9 · 14k views
- Drax99 · 9.5k words · 376 13 · 9.5k views
Join our SubscribeStar to remove these adverts!
Join our SubscribeStar to remove these adverts!
Stats
Page generated in 0.098 seconds
Total duration
643 users online
757,425 hits today, 2,004,447 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Haven't started reading yet, but I can tell this won't end well
Ha, I don't think the title is all that accurate. Poor Dash
And that is why I took data management and not Calculus in grade twelve - I feel your pain Rainbow - numbers are evil even before being mixed with letters and squiggly symbols 
Well, this was fun!
Definite up-vote!
This is a funny idea, but it feels like it ended too abruptly. Still, a decent one-shot.
"What am I supposed to do with it" sums up my relationship with Math.
Very awesome story.
Twilight sure doesn't make a good teacher... there are quite a few nicer ways to explain limits. At least, start off by explaining how to find the slope of a curve geometrically, then "move point A closer to point B" for higher accuracy, etc.
I can't even see calculus anymore. Whenever I try to look at it my eyes shoot off to one side and my brain starts playing reruns of america's funniest home videos.
im sad for rainbow, twilight is such a bad teacher
Rainbow sounds like me when I took calculus....
949929
Yup, The farther into math you go, the less numbers there are, basically.
949949
Personally, like the intellectual stimulation of a challenging math problem, and am actually planning to go into meteorology (lots of math there!).
Thanks!
949955
((By the way, people, Stewart doesn't actually introduce limits like that! Or rather, they don't do that until you're familiar with the whole limits thing. It's just the textbook I used, and I don't know any other ones))
Believe me, I facepalmed when I saw that some textbooks actually introduce limits with the delta-epsilon definition.
First thought: Oh this'll be easy!
See's equation: hyper-ad.com/tutoring/math/calculus/images/prop_deriv604.gif
GET THEM OUT OF MY HEAD!!!
Wow, that was getting good, and then it seemed to end really quickly!
I was kindof hoping that Cheerilee would come in and totally save the day (and/or show up Twilight).
949997 dude she sounds like everyone when they took calculus
BAHAHAHAHAHA
this is awesome! I hated the epsilon delta definition. And i still havent bothered to figure it out. I really hope that if you ever rewrite this, it will be a bit longer.
950200
fucking quotient rule gets me all the time
I feel for you RD. This pretty much sums up high school.
math.montana.edu/frankw/ccp/calculus/deriv/mirror/eq5.gif
scielo.br/img/revistas/cam/v23n2-3/a06frm04.gif
math10.com/en/university-math/calculus/imgFig115.gif
e.asset.soup.io/asset/1718/1774_b0d9.jpeg
I always sat in the back of math class playing games on my graphing calculator, or developing stories for why the letters and numbers on the pages were wielding medieval arms against one another. I thank you for the nostalgia.
... another weather peagsus who has the requisite education...
It's not an official letter without an ironic typo.
Bulbasaur used Mindbuck! It's super Effective! Raising Shadows Fainted! Red is out of Usable Ponies! Red Whited Out!
Damn... I didn't have any idea of what was supposed to be going on other than Twilight teaching Rainbow what super-specific symbols mean. That was kinda sad. Plus it ended too quickly! It needs to be Longer!
952350
Oops. Fixed
This is me giving out my first ever FiMFiction thumbs-down.
Here's why.
You give us an interesting premise right there in the title. You set up the reasons behind it in the opening of the story. Then there are three scenes: Dash tries this on her own, Dash asks Twilight for help, and Twilight attempts to help. And then the story just... stops. Sure, we see Dash get frustrated, twice, and that's mildly amusing on its own, but then... we just skip to the end and get a pass/fail report of her eventual results, and that's supposed to be a resolution? That's like watching Return of Harmony up to the balloon garden scene and then suddenly being told "and they all lived miserably ever after." You could call it an ending, and you could admit there were some good jokes beforehand, but you certainly couldn't call the full work an entertaining story- you'd have no idea how things progressed in the period of time you just missed, and no understanding of how the characters as you know them could allow that resolution. And that's how I feel here. No matter how useless Twilight is at first glance, she's devoted to the ideal of helping her friends, and I can't see her just blindly following a path that isn't getting her there. No matter how clueless Rainbow is on her first attempt, she's determined to succeed and keep her job, and I can't see her either giving up or continuing down an unsuccessful path until she runs out the clock. You might be able to portray these characters attacking this problem in such a way that leads to the resolution you've crafted. That's what authors do to successfully surprise readers without alienating them, and Celestia knows I've been in that position before.* But I don't know whether you can do that after reading this story, because you didn't try.
* A simple example is the case of Trusty John in the Fables comic book series: John's character and origins are such that he literally never breaks a promise or betrays a trust, so readers are surprised when they find he has been feeding information to the Adversary, sworn enemy of his comrades in Fabletown- but they come to understand when they learn the full situation, because they're informed that John pledged allegiance to that enemy before ever learning of Fabletown's existence, and so everything he's done in his position there has been part of following the earlier, encompassing orders he received from the Adversary. We would never imagine this on our own, but the writers give us circumstances that make it believable.
I know calculus. I just don't like doing it often. but I will like this story.
953855
Hmm, in my mind, Twilight Sparkle is completely incapable of helping Rainbow Dash in this way. Remember when she was asked about the function of an anemometer in Hurricane Fluttershy? And Dash, well... she dropped out of school and has to read out loud. I'd peg her pretty close to being incapable of learning calculus. It's quite obvious that nothing either of them could do that would get Dash ready for the course in November by the end of the first teaching session, so I just stopped there. I mean, I guess Dash might try learning on her own again after she and Twilight realize that Twilight can't help her, but we've seen that that doesn't work, so I don't really see what the point would be in showing Rainbow Dash trying to learn by herself and failing again. Besides, Dash had already enlisted the help of "the smartest mare in Ponyville" and so I believe that she's convinced she can't learn calculus. Sure, she has confidence in herself, but that doesn't exactly extend itself to academics.
I've set up the train wreck and put it into motion, and feel no need to elaborate on what the conductor and the passengers are doing, because, well, you probably know. I guess you could say that the title and synopsis do the same thing, but the whole point of the story was to get you to laugh, in the way that a 6-minute Disney short gets you to laugh.
Did it?
954583
Not quite. The bit with Twilight just reading the definition of a limit and treating it as if it were second-grade reading level stuff was amusing, but it takes a lot to get me to actually laugh. (I'm just like that for some reason.)
I think part of my problem with your story structure is that if you want to treat this as all we need to see of Rainbow's learning process and leave the results as a foregone conclusion, then there's no reason to include the demotion letter- you could end on Dash banging her head against something and that would be funny and leave us to draw our own conclusions about her chances. The letter just feels sad and mirthless in comparison.
I would still say I'd prefer to see Dash approaching this with the same determination she shows her stunt practice, whether that means getting a more entry-level textbook or a different study buddy- but taking what you've got here and ending on a funny note rather than a flat one would still be a marked improvement.
954717
Thank you for identifying what's wrong with my story! Yeah, I guess I did go overboard in being cruel to RD in the letter. I was going for that, choosing my words very carefully and making sure that Rainbow was as screwed as possible, but I guess it didn't go over quite like I'd expected it to. I'll keep your comments in mind for the next time I try to pull off something like this.
Again, thank you!
950161
Yeah, pretty much. Numbers aren't real math, they're mere arithmetic.
Why am I getting a sudden, extreme case of deja vu?
950200 - nice proof - I liked it! It's good to remember good old times of limit definitions :] It's a pity, Rainbow does not know the de l'Hospital rule (the most useful thing concerning limits :]).
I also thought this will be a bit longer - I would love an actual story about Rainbow learning this stuff (up to, say simple integrals)!
Ok, please don't make a sequel unless it's going to fix this story by giving her job back. I was disappointed in this story because you pretty much ruined Rainbowdashs life, I don't feel Twilight would let Dash go to the test without knowing everything. It seems like you don't want to do a thousand words, so if your not going to try to even do that try to at least do better next time.
PS. The title doesn't fit, it implies she actually learned calculus.
Till the next one
-R
If only we could learn by osmosis
Pfft.... We learnt calculus without the teacher having to explain what the buck 'lim_x' is...