Post 35: The Trouble with Trig (And Other Fields of Math)

(In case you haven't noticed, the title is a reference to "The Trouble with Tribbles," an episode from the original Star Trek series.)

So it looks like I will be taking a calculus course again. For the third time. In high school I was in advanced placement classes and one of them was calculus. I sort of considered the word "calculus" a swear word. Not because I didn't like the class. I didn't like the material. I'll get into this in a moment. The advanced placement courses had exams you could take at the end of the year. If you passed, you would get college credit and not need to take the courses in college. I didn't bother with the exam. First of all, I didn't think we could afford yet another $86 exam. Secondly, I had exactly no confidence in my calculus skills even though I didn't do half bad in the class.

In my sophomore year of community college I took the course again. I did well, but the way it was done wasn't very good for me. It was a month-long summer course and class was five days a week. Well at the times the class was being held, I was working. I'd get about one day a week off of work to get to the class. I would ride my bike three miles in 100-degree weather to make it to the last hour of the class. It was pretty rushed. My high school class made things a little easier for me, and I had an advantage over my three classmates.

Kansas State University has a requirement for incoming transfer students where you have to take free online placement exams for algebra and calculus. I did the algebra exam and had trouble with that, but not major issues. Today I'm taking my second stab at the calculus exam and ohmigoodness. Actually it's both trigonometry and calculus. No doubt I'm scoring higher than average but still the material is insanely difficult for me.

Despite being somebody who has historically been more interested in math and science than anything else, math itself has always seemed to be my weak point. Here in the United States we take what are called the Standardized Aptitude Tests, or SATs, in our 11th year of schooling (junior year of high school). The score is out of 2400 and the average grade is something like 1500. I got an 1810 on it, which is pretty good. My lowest score was in math with a 530. Oddly enough, writing and reading were 660 and 640 respectively. Maybe I should focus on my writing more?

Calculus frustrates me. It does a good job of ruining my mood for the rest of the day. I know that I need to answer the stuff correctly to get a good score, and being unable to do that really upsets me. I've actually done Google searches in frustration asking "Why is calculus so hard?" and it's interesting to see what kind of results I've gotten. Calculus is not a new field of math in the sense that it's unrelated to things like geometry and algebra. In fact, it's a culmination of all of them. It's also much more abstract and relies on theory more than any other field of math I've encountered.

It's also the start of a new field of math, not the ultimate end of it. There's new stuff to be learned, which feels like it comes straight from left field. I've noticed it relies heavily on the slope of a line, but does the weirdest and disturbing things with it. In times of frustration I've humorously referred to it as a sin to do calculus. Exponents are put in places they should never go. If I were a number and somebody tried to perform calculus on me, I'd be offended.

Now honestly some things were easy and remain simple. I can do derivatives and integrals without much fuss. I've kept my notes from high school so I can look back when I need help. Implicit differentiation is kinda fun to do. But some of the more bizarre stuff makes me want to derive myself off a cliff. (If you get that joke, you probably need to get outdoors more.) Originally when I found the name of the guy who made this field of math was Leibniz, I realized who it was that I didn't like. Ironically, he came up with an argument for the existence of God, which redeems him somewhat.

The other pain in the butt is trigonometry. The main problem with trig is that it takes you away from numbers and instead relies on words: sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. When it comes to math, I want to think in terms of numbers and algorithms. Pythagorean Theorem, Law of Cosines, and so on. With trig, we don't get algorithms. We get these magical words. I was never taught the inner workings of these words. Instead I just punched a number into them and out came another number. I couldn't imagine in my brain how they produced their output. Then I was supposed to treat these words as numbers and algorithms themselves. But I didn't know what I was working with. That made it hard for me to mentally capture what I was doing.

So that's my rant. Advanced mathematics is my bane. I've never been exceptionally good at it (which admittedly is by my own unnecessarily high standard). Yet somehow I need to know this to get anywhere in my intended field of employment. Unless I become a better writer.