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Don't miss my next post. It'll be commercial free.

Math Blues

When I was a kid, I took Tae Kwon Do from a child molester, but that's another story. Among the useful things I learned from my teacher were to limit my use of the word "can't." In frustration, I might say, "I can't do 50 push ups." To which his reply would be, "Don't say you can't, say you haven't yet."

In that spirit, I have yet to become a math person. I don't know what the difficulty is but I think it may be genetic. My brother is also not yet good a math. I'm not sure about my parents, but I don't think they have above average math skills either.

I am in pursuit of a degree in Computer Science or some releated field or perhaps just mechanical engineering. It really doesn't matter which degree I go for they all require more math than I had to take to get my degree in history.

Over the summer I sat in on a college algebra class as a refresher. The teacher was great and it was actually interesting to sit in on the class and not have to do any of the work, though I usually did the homework just to follow along.

This fall I enrolled in college trig. I never took trig in high school so it's all new material. I never knew what sine, cosine, secant, cosecant, tangent and cotangent actually were. Now I do. Funny thing is, I would ask people who ought to know -- my wife, my boss -- the former was good in math and the latter has a pair of degrees in engineering, and neither of them could really tell me that they are simply ratios of the sides of triangles.

We're neck deep in trigonometric identities now and the work is getting increasingly difficult. I actually did very well on the mid-term (95%), but took a quiz today and am fairly confident that I bombed it.

I'm going to have to rededicate myself to the course. Starting a couple of days ago, I've doubled the amount of time I'm spending studying. I need to master the concepts and get an A in the course. Next semester I'm enrolled in Calc I, there's no time to be left behind.

I have yet to become good at math.