Before I resumed my education and began this journey in Discovery Informatics, I did as much research as possible. Among those efforts was a meeting with the Assistant Chairman of the Mathematics Department. I disclosed my dream, my background, and then got to the point: Could I, at my age and with my lack of background in math, possibly get through the DI program? His response was brief, brutal, and very honest. If you struggle with pre-calculus and algebra, you probably shouldn’t be in the program.
Fair enough. The A in algebra boosted my spirits, but the C+ in pre-calculus scared me. Then it was on to Calculus I…….a mightly battle from which I emerged scarred, and, to a certain extent, wiser.
Today, I walked into my Calc II class. Yes, there stood my old friend, the Assistant Chairman. He began the class with a brief slide presentation; the last dozen or so semesters of Calc I students whol earned either A, A-, or B+ in the class. Know from my Statistics classes that they represent a sample of sufficient size so that we can assume a normal distribution, aka, the bell curve, in the grade distribution. Note, too, that he did not include in his sample population those students who earned a grade less than B+ (like me). He then showed a grade distribution of those students in Calc II.
The median was a C+. There were plenty of grades worse than that (I know, and you should too, the median is the 50th percentile). Some freshman whippersnapper, fresh off his AP SAT score, and thus placed in this class, and heretofore considered by his high school classmates as a genius, stated to the professor that he would, without doubt, get an A. The prof begged to differ, stating that half of us will drop or fail, and of the rest, only 2 or 3 will get an A. Added the prof, You might get an A, and I hope you do, but numbers don’t lie.
Whatever sangfroid I might have felt disappeared completely during this exchange of data, to be replaced with that old familiar sensation….gut wrenching fear. Pulse racing, blood pressure elevated, the room suddenly became too warm and I struggled to breathe. I thought that I had trained myself to suppress these periods of anxiety (that primarily arrived just before any tests), but NO!
So the battle resumes. Visits to the math lab, visits to the professor’s office, Sundays spent studying, and anxiety like you don’t know in the days before each test (4 and a Final that is cumulative); these will be my routines this semester.
Wish me luck, I’m gonna need a lot of it……..
” Sounds like the real world “. It’s what’s left of the real world and you’re to be commended for clawing your way back into it through sheer dint of will. This is what used to make or break real people, but today the C of C and countless other colleges offer so much froth, so many stylish way for fools to coast through the curriculum that it’s a wonder that graduates can find their cars after the ceremony.
Once there were focused people who died in harness enriching the real world, but the bulk of today’s grads will simply slump over, face in keyboard staring into a world which wasn’t real and didn’t matter. Math might be the only truth out there.
This post made me smile – both because of your honesty about your anxiety and how the professor felt that he (for some reason) needed to instill fear in his students. I’ve never understood the later, and have experienced my share of the former. If it was easy, if it was going to be a breeze – I’d have to say ‘Why do it?’. So good for you. (And by the way, did you ever get in touch with the DI guy that I said works with us at HML? Let me know if you didn’t). Oh – and good luck!