Math Sucks

Sometimes I wonder about those upper level classes that I will never take. For instance, math. One semester of calc one was more than enough to make up my mind never to take math again. I just don’t understand what possesses people to take calc one million or DiffEq (or even what it means). Personally, I would rather melon-ball my left eye out than do one more derivative. I didn’t need the class, and I pretty much dreaded every day.

One time, I was walking there and hoping against hope that Gellerson had burned down or been hit by a meteorite or my class had been canceled in some other way, shape or form. As I passed Kretzmann, I heard a loud beeping noise. My heart leapt. Maybe class is canceled! I thought in my calc-hatred induced mindset. That sounds like a fire alarm! My pace quickened. I didn’t mind going to calc if I would be able to turn around and go straight back home. As it turns out, the sound of a bus backing out the VUCA parking lot makes that same noise. I ended up having to go to calc anyway. Probably only to fail a quiz.

Maybe that’s the purpose of calc one: to weed out the ones who aren’t ‘math department’ material. (Me, for one.) After you get past that milestone, you’re home free. I bet calc is pretty much one big party. For all I know, anyway. Calc two: you throw confetti every time you open that math book. You party so hard, integrations by trigonometric substitution make sense. There’s music, dancing, laughing, and 3-D graphic plots of hyperbolic sine function. Or something. Calc three? Yikes. Non-stop action. Sometimes you wake up the day after class with a notebook full of equations, neat boxes around each answer, calculator calluses on your fingertips and no idea how any of it got there. DiffEq- I can’t even fathom the crazy fun that goes on in there. I hear there used to be a calc four, but no one had the stamina for a semester long party of that caliber.

As far off as my guesses might be, I’d rather be dead wrong than find out the truth. At least in the case of upper level math, ignorance is bliss. I don’t claim to have knowledge about any of those math terms beyond the names. I had one semester of calc, and I can guarantee I’ll never make a withdrawal from those short-term memory banks again. That account is closed, and I have a nice ‘S’ on my report card for my trouble. Yahoo for pass/fail courses.