This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 1:09 am and is filed under Tales From the Lakeside Villa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
My TH will be home almost any minute now!
I am SO READY. Gosh. I hate it when he’s gone.
Guess what else. (I sound like Junie B. Jones, and if you haven’t read the Junie B. Jones, get a small female friend or relative and read one with her. They are hysterically funny and addicting.)
Remember how I took that math test last Friday?
Yeah.
I got SIXTY-NINE PERCENT.
I have NEVER got such a bad grade, EVER, in ANY class.
Horrors. I almost cried, I was so horrified. And I really don’t know why, there are certain types of problems (hello, distributing) that don’t make any sense to me. Even when I get them right, which I normally do in the homework, I don’t know WHY.
I hate that about math. I like problems that make SENSE. Like, they are about money, or batting averages, or statistics of some kind, like how the percentage of joggers killed in Central Park has gone down from that year to this.
But just BLANK NUMBERS, that don’t help anyone or hurt anyone, they are just NOTHING…..I have a hard time understanding something that is so utterly pointless.
*sigh*
But I got 104% on my survey of art test (there was an extra credit question, which I aced, therefore four points over), which was MUCH harder than I thought it would be, but still, that’s words and pictures! so clearly, that has some connection to real life and can therefore be understood.
See, here’s what I don’t like. Even if I ever AM able to do certain types of math problems well and consistently ( which I WILL, because I do NOT get bad grades!), they will still mean nothing. Because they are just numbers. So I will just know them from memorizing the procedure.
I mean, I might as well go work in a factory, running a machine that puts a logo stamp on the bottom of a can.
Stamp, stamp, stamp. All day long. Somebody’s got to do it, right? but that is exactly the same as doing math problems with blank numbers that mean nothing.
Frustrated. I don’t want to waste hundreds of hours learning (at great personal cost) something so utterly pointless, and DONT EVEN TELL ME I AM GOING TO USE THIS:
2(7y - 146 x -4y) + 3 = 17
Yeah. No.
I would rather jump off a very tall cliff without any water at the bottom than have ANY JOB that required me to do that. I don’t care how much money it could earn me, either.
Yeah, I’m frustrated. Of course, I will figure out why I don’t get it, and I will make myself learn it, because I have to to get a good grade. But I’m angry that I have to waste my time like that.
posted by February 3, 2009 1:09 am | read comments (6)
Roux
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:10 am
I feel your pain. That’s what I got on first and last test I took in my Algebra class this semester…and then I dropped it…I’m going to have to take it by itself or with one other class….
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:38 am
Oh dang - I failed at math, miserably!
“DONT EVEN TELL ME I AM GOING TO USE THIS”
I’ve been told it’s not for us to use. It’s to train your brain for other complex problems and to help you learn to concentrate. Dunno if the HS stuff helped me…
February 3rd, 2009 at 4:18 am
My brain works exactly the same way as yours, apparently. I did just fine in first-year algebra and geometry; I could see how they could actually solve real-world problems. I have no doubt that trig and calculus solve real-world problems, too…except that my teachers were so inept that they never gave me a clue about that.
Some part of my brain rebelled against learning stuff without an answer to the question “Why?” I did poorly in those courses, and not much better in Algebra II, which was taught more abstractly and more disconnected from reality than Algebra I.
If I can’t figure out how to USE something, my brain categorizes it as USELESS. And I have no time for the useless.
So, I agree with Katye77: I feel your pain.
February 3rd, 2009 at 8:49 am
I do feel your mathematical pain. I was pretty bad at math until I started to pay attention in class and TRY. It was the only class in which I had to try in order to get good grades. It started from feeling competitive against my boyfriend at the time who got a better math grade than me
No you won’t use it but it does force your brain to work in a certain way and it’s good exercise I guess.
February 4th, 2009 at 12:22 am
Guess I am the oddball here, I LOVE algebra and complicated stuff. I took 2 1/2 years of it in high school AND took trig. The part of math I was really bad at was statistics. In college it was required for my major. It started off ok, then the formulas were [and I am NOT joking] 3 lines long. The prof didn’t give us a list of them on test day, nor were we allowed to have available our own sheet of the formulas. I just could not remember those super long ones and ended up with a D. I took it cause no way in Hades I was sitting through THAT again, lol.
February 4th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
I’m lousy at math… and I majored two semesters in astronomy! Needless to say, I bombed! lol