Bob's Xcellent Math Adventure - or maybe not

Well, maybe not so excellent.

I've had a long-standing interest in math (in spite of having atrocious marks in high school and in undergrad) and I decided I would try (re-)taking my high-school math for the pleasure of it. You might ask what kind of warped sense of pleasure do I have? I'm not sure, I'm still trying to figure that out...

Anyway, I enroled a few weeks ago in a high-school math course, because I couldn't find it in the non-credit continuing education guide. Why aren't there hordes of people lining up to take Advanced Functions and Introductory Calculus for fun? Go figure. Anyway, it's not like I needed the credit - I took a similar course 30+ years ago. Note I say "similar" and not "identical." Now that I've spent some time in the course, it appears there were at least 2 major revisions of the curriculum since my butt has last warmed the seat of a school desk, and I'm seeing first hand the changes that have been made.

I've just gotta tell about my experience. So here they are, in no particular order:

1. Homework. Man, what a rough ride. Too much to do, not enough time. What with stuff to do around the house, cooking, etc. I just don't have enough time to get on top of things. I actually took a Friday off so I could devote myself to doing homework early on in the course. Interesting thing is that I didn't even see the hours go by - I missed lunch without realizing it. I figure I was in a state of hyperfocus. The downside is, if you don't do your homework (for whatever reason), that Big Black Train of Math starts to pick up speed as you frantically try to keep pace and jump on board. Nowhere did it hit me harder than last night when I "bombed" our weekly test. In a moment of paralyzed insight, staring at my blank piece of foolscap. Yup, I shoulda stayed on top of that homework.

2. Satisfaction. The most interesting realization I've had is that I'm an inveterate puzzle-solver. I think that's why I like math. Solving math questions is exactly like solving a puzzle. Kinda like Sudoku On Steroids and Adrenaline.

3. Frustration: Oh, I could spend a lot of time on this one. With time, I could describe a veritable taxonomy of frustration related to math. Let me just hit the big ones.

Attention to detail. A big chunk of my frustration with myself is I make what I consider an inordinate number of errors of attention: errors of transcription, forgetting to put a minus sign, writing "3" when I meant "13", you get the idea. But what alarms me is that I make A LOT of mistakes. Out of at least 50 problems I have worked on and gotten wrong the first time around, in at least 45 cases I went back over my math to realize that I mistranscribed or whatever. VERY frustrating. I wonder if I must suffer from some kind of AADD. But that's for another blog entry.

Gaps in understanding. Ah, this is like an old but unwelcome friend come to visit. I'd actually forgotten that particular feeling until last night, when I lost track of what the teacher was saying as he explained a particular problem. Maybe I should have termed it more precisely "a gap in attention." Whatever it was, I didn't quite understand as the teacher went through the problem, and I frantically wrote down the solution in the hope that I'd be able to go back over my notes and work out where my Big Black Train of Math Thought got derailed. I spent 5 minutes SOLID looking over the notes on that particular section and figuring out how we were supposed to come to the solution. I'm STILL not sure I understand it rightly.

Failure of memory: This one is the cousin of Gaps in Understanding and has a very ugly brother called Over-Confidence. This very "odd couple" also came to visit me last night during my test. There's nothing like that warm fuzzy feeling that you get reading over your notes before a test and thinking "yeah, I'll remember this" or "yeah, I know how to do this one" and, when you're looking at that piece of foolscap when the test has started, you don't. At that moment, you realize that you have something in common with that particular piece of paper: the word fool.

So why, you may ask, are you going through this? You don't NEED this course, you're getting frustrated by it, you're spending two weeknights from 6 to 10 PM feeling your bum get numb sitting at a cramped desk, getting poor grades, and most everyone thinks you're cMy short answer to this is: I don't know.

No, just kidding. I DO know the answer, I'm just not telling you (or myself, for that matter). There is a reason, only I haven't quite figured it out, yet. There's a certain lemming-like quality to the feeling around the reason. For now, it's enough for me to know that I enjoy math, it's fascinating, it's a puzzle, and I want to understand it more.

More later.