Thursday, October 26, 2006
Calculus II
By the way, Calculus II is painful. It's like torture in that when you think it can't get any worse, it does. When the professor said "integration of inverse hyperbolic trigonometric functions" a few weeks into it my head split open and the marbles spilled out everywhere. And that was only the beginning.
My first exam I got a 69.3 on. I was crushed. It was the worst grade I had gotten on a test since my return to college. Then I got mad at myself. So for the second exam I took a day off work, sat alone at the dining room table and studied all day long. When I went into the classroom for the test that evening I was saturated with formulas and methods. And it paid off - I got a 100.7 on the exam.
Now we are into sequences and series... power series, harmonic series, blah blah. It is conceptually difficult and I believe a few of the people who aren't showing lately have dropped out. I can understand why. It is totally mental - if your brain can't go into that space where numbers and graphs can be manipulated at will, you don't stand a chance. I feel like I have learned an entire new vocabulary, and in the process lit a previously dark section of my mind.
It feels pretty good.
By the way, Calculus II is painful. It's like torture in that when you think it can't get any worse, it does. When the professor said "integration of inverse hyperbolic trigonometric functions" a few weeks into it my head split open and the marbles spilled out everywhere. And that was only the beginning.
My first exam I got a 69.3 on. I was crushed. It was the worst grade I had gotten on a test since my return to college. Then I got mad at myself. So for the second exam I took a day off work, sat alone at the dining room table and studied all day long. When I went into the classroom for the test that evening I was saturated with formulas and methods. And it paid off - I got a 100.7 on the exam.
Now we are into sequences and series... power series, harmonic series, blah blah. It is conceptually difficult and I believe a few of the people who aren't showing lately have dropped out. I can understand why. It is totally mental - if your brain can't go into that space where numbers and graphs can be manipulated at will, you don't stand a chance. I feel like I have learned an entire new vocabulary, and in the process lit a previously dark section of my mind.
It feels pretty good.
Labels: calculus, college, math
¶ 9:19 PM
