Math Tests. Guillotines, and Other Deadly Devices

There's an odd sort of blissful acceptance that one feels immediately after completing a test. I believe that it's the same sort of feeling that French Aristocrats felt when the henchman let go of the ropes.

It's a strange feeling, to be sure. It's as if I've jumped into a pool of lava, I know I'm going to die, there's nothing I can do about it, but I don't seem to care anymore. It's almost as if I know I should be concerned, but I'm not. Hm.

Quantative Reasoning is something of a revolution in my math world. When I graduated from Club Heights Elementary School, my sixth grade teacher fatally believed that I was proficient enough in math to skip Pre-Algebra. And when I say fatally, I mean for me. I distinctly remember my first day in my Algebra class. My teacher handed out a sheet and the first problem read...

1. 3x+4y=25x Find y.

I stared at the sheet for about twenty minutes.

My world was visibly falling apart. I hadn't the faintest idea of what I was looking at.

My teacher, a 64 year-old woman with one daughter (who had a pregnancy that ended with a C-section, as she told us just about every day) and a disturbing fascination with vacuum cleaners, came around to my desk and casually asked...

"Is everything okay?"

I looked up at her and said "I don't think I understand the question."

She smiled and spoke in a condescending tone about studying over the summer and keeping up with my studies. I felt like screaming in her face "When the heck did letters become numbers?!!!"

And the rest of my mathematical career went downhill from there. Ever since that day, I have had to struggle to maintain a steady C grade in my math classes. The only reason I passed geometry was because we were assigned in the last week of school to make a kite using geometric functions. The kite didn't fly, but I was able to make a decent-looking one.

But now that I'm in quantative reasoning (where my teacher couldn't care less about the numbers as long as I understand the concepts), I believe that I'm making improvement. I just finished my first math test and I feel fairly confident about it.

But I've been wrong before.