It's like riding a bike
Granted it took me a bit and I even questioned myself once or twice, but I did remember how to do math last night.Not just math, but adding, subtracting, multiplication and division of fractions. I can do math like that. I can do geometry. I can do trig. However, I cannot do calculus.
Calculus raped me.
Twice.
The first was when I was a freshman at HC. I still had a fantasy that I was going to be a pre-engineering major. My belief was that I could handle calc at a college level. I was wrong. More wrong than I had been in a while.
For the first month, I held my own. Soon after that, I began to struggle. I received one of my tests back, with a nearly failing grade. Being responsible, I walked up to the front of the class to talk to the instructor, Will. I asked Will if we could sit down and go over my test, to which he replied "Sure. Let's do it this afternoon." That was fine with me as I knew that I could skip work for school related stuff. But at the end of the class, he called me up and said that he had forgotten an appointment so we'd have to do it some other time.
Fine with me, I thought, I'll go to work. At the time, I still worked in the maintenence dept of the golf course. At 1 ish, I slid out there, greased and gassed up my mower and away I went. I had been mowing the rough for maybe an hour. I was actually working on the right side of hole number 1 when I saw a single player strolling down the fairway. I saw where he had hit his shot, so I mowed around where the ball lay. When I got near him, I realized it was my instructor, Will.
Will had blown me off to go play golf. So, I did the most natural thing I could, I went back and mowed right over his ball, slicing it into two pieces. That bastard had blown me off. After my initial rage subsided (about a week later) I tried to schedule another appointment. This time he said he would be in.
I showed up at the right time. He wasn't there. He didn't show up after 10 minutes, 20 minutes or even 30 minutes. That's pretty much the point when I quit caring.
That was rapage one.
My second year at HC, I was stubborn enough to believe that I could still take calc and pass. That year, there was a different instructor by the name of Jonathan. This guy was a geek. An incredibly book smart geek, but lacking some serious social skills. Anyways, grades were pretty much based on weekly quizzes for him. He told us at the beginning of the semester that quizzes weren't able to be made up. Fine, I thought.
The struggles ensued. By December, I was fed up with the class. I wasn't the only one. All of the sudden, I found out that he had been letting the international students retake their quizzes all semester. All FREAKING SEMESTER. The quizzes that weren't able to be made up or retaken, had been at the international students disposal for 15 weeks. I told my buddy Warren who nearly knocked a light pole down. (I helped by kicking it. The light wasn't the same for a long time.)
Rapage two.
That's why Calc will never be my friend.
posted by Rusty @ 7:05 AM
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