9. Calculus: Please, Make it Stop

I’m good with English. I understand the language, I have good reading comprehension, and I write fairly well. Naturally, English classes are something that I don’t mind and even enjoy. I know a good number of people who think I’m weird because they hate English. They hated it in elementary, they hated it in high school, and they can’t wait to get it over with in college.

I could handle never being in an English class again, but I’m fine with having to take a few credit hours my first year. The University requires all undergraduates to take at least two basic English courses, which so far has resulted in a much-needed GPA boost for me. If it didn’t require being in school for two more years, I would double major in secondary English education.

English 101 was unexciting, but I got an A in the class without a lot of effort. My professor was a little old guy with a sarcastic sense of humor, and I thought he was cool. He was funny, seemed to enjoy teaching, and did his best to make the class interesting. Our only regular homework was brief reading assignments, we brushed up on grammar skills, and the big papers we had to turn in weren’t too big.

I went so far as to register for an extra English class second semester because everything else was full. I enjoy learning about great writers, reading classic novels, and sharpening my language skills. Plus, when you find a college course you can get an A in, you tend to gravitate towards electives in that department.

Math, on the other hand, is not something I enjoy. I can identify with people who detest studying English and don’t understand it, because I feel the same way about math – so much goes completely over my head. I got good grades in high school math... but high school math, serious as the advanced classes get, is not calculus. I struggled to understand some stuff in high school, but I handled it (never got worse than a B). Friends and great teachers made the difficult much more bearable.

What I hate is this: once you get past geometry you start to wonder what happened to good old-fashioned numbers. You know, those things you can plug into a calculator for an instant result. It makes sense that kids be required to learn basic mathematical concepts – even if you have a calculator it’s important to understand addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and maybe a couple of those more difficult things. For the most part, though, higher math is useless for everyone not entering a math-intensive field.

Topics like geometry and low-level algebra are real and reasonable, but by the time you reach precalc you’ve gotten into all sorts of complex variable garbage. You only see actual numbers when they are being used as exponents or coefficients to variables; awful, confusing variables that have to be simplified, cancelled out, or worse. Then you have sines, cosines, and more abstract topics that make me sick just mentioning them.

No wonder calculus scared me from the start! I knew I could never hope for a teacher as good as those I had in high school, and expected that my professor would have too many students to care if I failed miserably. I also knew that, even with good teaching, high school classes were pushing the limit of how much math my brain could comprehend.

Alas, the University requires calculus for my major. Some bigwig decided it was something every business major needed to know. I don’t know who made this rule or why, but I suspect illegal drugs and possibly blackmail were involved. Please, someone tell me why I need to know calculus.

My career goal is to start a firm that designs and maintains websites. I’m interested in the internet, I’m good with computers, and I have a talent for writing webpage code. I came to college to prepare myself for the future. How will calculus ever help me? I’m not tweaking the blueprints for a skyscraper, and I don’t see myself manipulating the flight path of the space shuttle any time soon.

Never in my life will I use a single thing I learned (or rather, was supposed to learn) in calculus. But the University wouldn’t give me a degree if I didn’t take it, and I wanted to get it over with. Calculus was the worst class on my first semester schedule by a long shot. If I ever find myself in a course harder than calculus, I will drop out of school, move to Canada, and devote my time to getting a date with Avril Lavigne.

The first day of class I walked in 10 seconds late. Or maybe the professor started early, which is possible because he seemed to start earlier every afternoon. The one thing I noticed as I went through the door (besides the fact that I was late) was the size of the class. About eighty people, almost four times as many as had been in my biggest class in high school. The next thing I noticed as I slid into an empty chair in the front row was that my professor was thoroughly foreign. And I had five days a week of this to look forward to. For sixteen weeks. Excellent.

I should have withdrawn to another section as soon as I saw my schedule, because my professor’s last name had eleven syllables in it and I could pronounce only a few of them. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against immigrants. But if I’m taking lecture notes on a subject I don’t understand, I’d sure better be able to understand the words themselves. I would be half lost in calculus if it were being taught by the Enunciation Champion of the Midwest, so the last thing I needed was another degree of confusion.

One night at study session a kid asked the supplemental instructor where our professor was from, because though he sounded South American he had never told us. The answer was a bit of a surprise – Guam. I had never met or heard of anyone from Guam. I was under the impression all they had down there were rare species of jungle animals. I stand corrected: it would seem that Guam is home to lizards, monkeys…and calculus professors.

His accent was heavy, but not terribly difficult to get used to. After a week or so, I could decode nearly everything he said. For example, he might say, “Now on da queez you hud to substract da vareeable minoos da fuctor of da secont term,” and I would figure out from his clean markings on the board that he was talking about subtraction and factors and something-something. It didn’t really matter, since the translated English carried little meaning.

I only skipped three lectures the entire semester, which I’m proud of since I had the stupid class five days a week. I might as well have skipped every day because I learned for maybe 16 of the 72,345 minutes I was there. And that’s a generous estimate. The professor went over things quickly and skipped steps as he did problems on the board – he was one of those guys you could tell was frighteningly intelligent. If we asked a question, he would repeat what he had just said as if there were no reason it should be difficult. A few people seemed to follow, but then out of 60 (after the first day, many of the original 80 were never seen or heard from again) college students you’re bound to have a couple math geniuses.

As for me, the only hope was study session. Bryce, the supplemental instructor (SI) for the course, introduced himself on the first day of lecture and passed out papers for us to let him know which times would work best for out-of-class sessions. The second day he told us when the study sessions would be, gave directions to the building and room, and invited everyone who needed help.

At first glance the student instructor might have been some math-crazed guy getting extra cash for a job that came easy to him. He would likely be as confusing as the professor himself, I thought. Fortunately, I was hugely mistaken in my initial judgment. Bryce was not being paid, had taken the job for work experience to be a middle school teacher, and was a great help.

There were study sessions three nights a week, and each lasted an hour. Bryce worked through problems with us, gave us some of his own examples, and answered questions. I went to most of the study sessions. Everything I learned about calculus, I learned from the supplemental instructor.

It sucked walking an extra 10 minutes in the dark and cold when the weather changed, but I knew it was my only chance. Before tests twenty people might show up for study session... normally there were just three to six of us. Nonetheless, the sessions were rarely cancelled. Bryce did his best to see that we understood everything we needed to.

Even with this frequent tutoring, calculus was a losing battle. I tried to do the homework for maybe the first week, but when I had no clue what to do on the very first assignment I knew it was pointless. The book was a waste and since the professor never checked our assignments my homework motivation quickly ran dry. Why burn another frustrating hour every day on something that was beyond my grasp? Take away its weight on my GPA, and I couldn’t have possibly cared less about calculus.

All I wanted was to get credit for the course and never think about math again. But midway through the semester, I started to seriously worry about accomplishing even that. I knew I’d been flaking out on homework and studying, but I simply didn’t care. I could not find motivation to spend extra time on something I hated so much.

Thankfully the professor curved the tests, of which there were three…followed by a final that would be worth twice as much as the others. With no homework scores and the totaled quiz grades worth only half a single test grade, the tests were everything.

I got a 64% on the first test. It came as a shock, since in high school an 85 would have been a low grade for me – but the shock was small. A curved 64 was a C and I was happy with that; a C would get me through calculus without damaging my GPA terribly. An “average” grade would be perfectly respectable and absolutely great as far as I was concerned.

Then I failed the second test with a 44, and I started to panic. There was no way I could fail calculus. If I failed it would ruin my schedule for at least two years, it would murder my average, and it would be all-around terrible. If I hadn’t learned much those first months about putting struggles into God’s hands, I would have lost it. I came close enough as it was.

This wasn’t the first time I had panicked during the semester. The second week of classes I missed three questions on my first science quiz and half the questions on my first calculus quiz. I wasn’t used to missing more than one or two questions on anything, ever. I nearly flipped out, and it was ridiculous. For several days I worried that this was only the start of bad grades to come, that I would lose my scholarships, that my college career was going to be a wash.

Slowly I calmed down, and prayed about it with real expectations of getting an answer. God gave me more peace than I had felt in a long time, and I stopped worrying so much about everything. I worked a little harder from then on and took a step back when I felt myself going off towards the paranoid end. God worked on me again when I failed that second calculus test.

When I thought about it, I realized a 44% on one test might not be awful. After all, I had only failed by a point given the curve, and my score from test one was a C. I was in fair condition, so long as my only goal was to pass. The third test came along, and I crawled through it with a mid-range D.

Halfway through December, the only thing left in my way was the final. I was determined to prepare much more than I had for the regular tests, and hoped for the best. By “best” here, I mean any score resulting in something other than failure. Many times I’ve needed God guiding my pencil – this time, I would need him standing in the hall with an answer key and a bullhorn.