Post-secondary or grade school.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    I loved math and was good at it until we got to integrals. I could do algebra, geometry, trigonometry, probability, and derivates…and loved all of them. But my brain went splat against integrals.

    I barely passed Calculus levels 3 and 4. Honestly, I should have failed them. The professor wasn’t very good, he knew this, and he took pity on me. But it was ultimately my own fault.

    It was kind of humiliating. I’d always done really well at math, and even tutored other students. Then I just hit a fucking wall with integrals. At that point, I fully understood how other students who struggled with math had felt all along. I had been empathetic to them. But now I suddenly knew what it was like.

    I sometimes wonder if a virus or some other unknown medical situation broke that part of my brain. It kind of felt like it. Or maybe it was just beyond my natural abilities, period.

    • Kaiyoto@lemmy.world
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      19 days ago

      I never understood integrals either! I don’t know if we covered it in a math class in high school but I got to college and took physics and encountered it. I was like “What in the fuck is this shit?!” I take that back. I think I did encounter it briefly in high school physics but the teacher was like, “don’t worry if you don’t get it right now, you’ll figure it out.” My fucking ass! That was college physics from like week 2!!!

      I tried to figure it out from the text book and that didn’t work. I went and bought a math book to try to figure it out, that obviously didn’t work. This was before YouTube and the internet getting big on any kind of instruction so it was just like," well fuck me I guess I’ll fail."

      What I should have done was gone to the teacher for help. They always said their hours when they were open but I never thought they would have time for me. I know better now. They would have been happy to help me but ignorance and probably low self esteem and all.

      Still don’t understand that integral shit. I eventually went back to school but become an English major instead of that shit.

      • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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        19 days ago

        I hate it, because I like reading and watching videos about physics…but when they throw formulas up there I can’t read them. I can read music. I can read code. But I can’t read advanced math.