Mathochism: It’s a B!

One woman’s attempt to revisit the math that plagued her in school. But can determination make up for 25 years of math neglect?

I’ve been avoiding my college’s website for the last week. Part of it had to do with Christmas — there was a lot to do, such as decorating and cooking and gift-buying and card-writing.

A bigger part of it had to do with denial.

What if I had once again screwed up the final, the way I did in Geometry? What if I had gone from the grade I had earned consistently to one lower, because I screwed up problems I actually knew how to solve? And in this case, what if I went from a B to a C?

A C in precalc, after all this time and work, would make me cringe. It would make me question that tenuous notion that I may not suck at math after all. It would make me fall back into that mindset that something isn’t worth doing unless you excel at it right away.

Mathochism: One more down

One woman’s attempt to revisit the math that plagued her in school. But can determination make up for 25 years of math neglect?

I’m done with the final, and all I can say is damn. Wait — make that da-yum.

That was one bear of a test! There were 66 problems, plus two extra credit, and we had three hours. Three hours may sound like a lot, but that’s less than three minutes a problem. And some of those problems were 5- or 6-minute problems!

Also, by the time I got to problem 50, my brain was starting to tire. None of the problems were hard, exactly, but with so many, they started to blur.

Blegh. Well, it’s over. I am hoping that I only got 10-12 wrong, so my B is assured.

Overall, it’s been a good, but tough, class. I have a month and a half to recover, then I go into my final Mathochism chapter.

All text copyrighted by A.K. Whitney, and cannot be used without permission.

Mathochism: The final chapter

One woman’s attempt to revisit the math that plagued her in school. But can determination make up for 25 years of math neglect?

We had our last review for pre-calculus, and I am now preparing my study plan for the final. Going over the tests, and seeing where I went wrong, was very helpful. Most of my mistakes were minor, such as not remembering that bounds require parentheses instead of brackets, or that cosine in the fourth quadrant is positive, or that a sine graph with a 4 pi period has at least one oscillation.

Then there were the sloppy mistakes, such as not erasing a bubble on the Scantron enough, or just filling in the wrong bubble because I was tired. There was nothing truly befuddling there, and the Youthful Professor explained the few problems with which I had the most trouble.

Mathochism: Math pride

One woman’s attempt to revisit the math that plagued her in school. But can determination make up for 25 years of math neglect?

I got my last exam back, and it was as bad as I feared — 76 percent. Well, technically, it was 80 percent, but I was so tired that day from my snore-filled powerless night that I marked the wrong space on the Scantron on a question and thus got it wrong.

Dammit, dammit, dammit!

The Youthful Professor was sympathetic but unyielding, and that’s okay, since allowing the “I marked the wrong space because I was tired” defense would likely open up a portal to hell. And it doesn’t matter, because this test score, my lowest, will be dropped anyway. My average is a solid B, and as long as I don’t choke on the final, my grade should be a solid B.

Mathochism: Snores and darkness

One woman’s attempt to revisit the math that plagued her in school. But can determination make up for 25 years of math neglect?

The final test of the semester was yesterday, and it was a real bear. It covered five chapters — well, to be fair, five half chapters — but there was still a lot to deal with.

I haven’t been displeased with the Youthful Professor for the most part, because he is serious about teaching, he is clear with his explanations and breaks down concepts well. But he refused to set a test schedule, saying we would have tests as the material required. The problem with that is that some of the tests were light on material, while others, like this last one, felt like an exercise in sausage making.

RA Diaries: My year in titanium

A year ago at about this time, two anesthesiology residents were trying to find a vein. They weren’t having much success; I’m a hard stick at the best of times, and I hadn’t had anything to drink or eat in 15 hours.

Many jabs later (including multiple ones in my left foot), they were able to put in an IV. A later attempt at an epidural failed miserably, requiring intubation. And yes, I am also very difficult to intubate.

It was not a good start to what’s been, to date, my largest and most complex surgery — a complete hip replacement. But by the end of the day, bruised and woozy and aching, I had a piece of metal where my bone used to be.

Mathochism: Fibonacci’s bunnies

One woman’s attempt to revisit the math that plagued her in school. But can determination make up for 25 years of math neglect?

Pre-calculus is almost over. We have one more actual lecture, then a review, then the last test, then more review, then the final.

I can’t really believe it, even though Thanksgiving is next week, and I’m already sick of Christmas carols and fretting about getting presents bought and cards sent and dinners planned.

We have left trigonometry behind and moved on to sequences. Sequences feel like classical math to me, since they involve counting and patterns and adding. And of course, no discussion on sequences can be had without mentioning Leonardo Pisano Bigollo, aka Fibonacci, who lived in the late 12th to mid-13th century, and whose greatest accomplishment (apart from reaching the ripe age of 80 in an era where most barely reached 40) was his “Liber Abaci.”

Mathochism: Calculus dread

One woman’s attempt to revisit the math that plagued her in school. But can determination make up for 25 years of math neglect?

I’m about two-thirds through pre-calc now, and I’m pulling a reasonably solid B average. Logarithm horrors aside, trigonometry feels pretty good, and the few forages into calculus so far, as in studying limits, didn’t feel too scary.

Still, I’m starting to dread calculus. Part of it may be bad memories from 20 years ago. A bigger part is a conversation I overheard the other day.

The class before ours is a calculus class, and I often arrive a bit early to secure my still-coveted front row seat, so I see what the calc professor is putting on the board. So far, it looks like a lot of trig. And a lot of limits.

Mathochism: Logs, damn logs!

One woman’s attempt to revisit the math that plagued her in school. But can determination make up for 25 years of math neglect?

The scheduling gods decided to give me a break, so I got to take that third pre-calc exam after all. I did my best to study for it, bringing all my books on the romantic mid-week getaway I had been planning with my spouse for months. (Poor man. At least he got to drink good wine while his math-obsessed wife solved problems in the tasting room gift shop.)

But this test was really dense. It only covered about a chapter and a half, but that chapter and a half included exponential equations, logarithms and trigonometry.

I’ve written before about logarithms, and how much they confused me. The first time I studied them in Algebra II, things were so much harder, since I was being taught by the Brofessor.

Mathochism: The elegance of sines

One woman’s attempt to revisit the math that plagued her in school. But can determination make up for 25 years of math neglect?

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been studying trigonometry. We started with triangle trig (spasiba, Uchitel, for ensuring I learned those 30-60-90 and 45-45-90 triangles last semester!), then moved on to the unit circle (thank you, summer pre-calc prof, for helping make that less confusing the second time), then onto graphs of the various trig functions.

I’ve written before of my lack of enthusiasm for graphs, but I must make an exception for trig graphs (and parabolas and hyperbolas, which are rather cool). What can I say? I’ve always loved water, and waves, and both the sine and cosine functions graph as glorious waves, oscillating back and forth over the x axis, making me want to dive in.