Note: This piece is rather choppy and needs to be cleaned up pretty substantially, because I wrote this well past my bedtime. I couldn’t sleep until I typed these thoughts down.

Well… I just got my final results for my 3rd precalculus exam and…. I failed. Well… I technically got a D (63.8%), but I still ate shit. As did the rest of the class, which means I'm not alone in my failure. 

It’s a little demoralizing because I studied pretty damn hard (perhaps, a little too hard) for that exam. I did the extra quiz portion which evidently added a few extra points to my exam grade, but not enough to get it to a passing grade (even if I got all of the questions 100% correct, it still wouldn't have added enough points to my final grade to get it to a 70% or above). But, at the end of the day, I tried my best. I studied. I went to office hours and asked for help. I left office hours with a couple of textbook recommendations and reassurance from my professor that I wasn’t “doing nearly as badly…” as I thought I was. And, I’ve since moved onto the next unit, which, so far, has been making much more sense. 

Even better, I can look back at exactly what I did wrong on my 3rd exam (because the prof gave it back to us with comprehensive feedback on what we did and didn’t do right), and I ordered a couple of precalculus workbooks to give me more examples to work through, so that I can gain a much more solid understanding of this stuff in preparation for the fall where I plan on taking calculus one. If, for some reason, I fail to get a C or above in this semester’s precalculus course, I’ll take precalculus again in the summer (perhaps I’ll take trigonometry too, but I haven’t decided yet). 

But, hope is not lost for this specific class. Despite my failing exam grade, I’m still holding a 75.6% in the class, which is a solid C. I’m doing a hell of a lot better at this point in the semester than I thought I would be doing, but I’m still determined to understand math in such a way that I don’t feel like my understanding of it is as shoddy as it currently feels. 

To achieve that, I have to put in the hard, hard work of figuring out how math actually works. I’m not sure how close or how far I am from figuring out trigonometry or advanced algebra, but I’m determined to figure that stuff out no matter where I am. Even if it takes me forever to learn it. 

In other words, I want to learn math and science like I’ve learned writing and playing the piano. As an adult, I have the power to do just that! I just have to put as much time and effort into learning math and science as I’ve put in to learn writing and music. 

However, I learned writing and music completely on my own, without any outside pressure or scorn for “playing the wrong note.” or forgetting a typo. If school was the place that primarily taught me how to write and play the music, I probably would’ve learned to dislike writing and music, just like I unfortunately learned to dislike math and science. 

Now, in college, the thirst for knowledge is there. But, the stress of exams and deadlines is also starting to get to me. 

I don’t do things very well under pressure. When I write, I write alone without a time limit. When I play music, I play music alone because I can’t do it when other people are watching me. So why do I expect myself to learn math and science very well in a college classroom? Let alone master it in sixteen weeks at a time? 

In other words, I don’t think it’s the math itself that’s getting to me. At home, I’m able to learn math very fast on my own, with very little anxiety. I think I’m having an issue with the environment in which I’m expected to learn/perform math and science in college. I was basically given sixteen weeks to master precalculus enough to handle calculus one, when I didn’t even have trigonometry under my belt! That’s almost like expecting me to learn how to write a dissertation in sixteen weeks as a beginner writer! If I learned to write like that, I’d hate writing, too!