mhuzzell | The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done

Logic was always my favourite thing, academically. The 'logic puzzle' worksheets we sometimes got in elementary school were my favourite of all our take-home work, and when I took my first introductory logic course in high school, I was literally bouncing with excitement over it. It was so fun, and it was easy. Maybe that was the problem: it was so easy for me. I never really had to work at it; it was just puzzles, and given a little practice I've always been good at those.

Word puzzles, anyway. Maths has always been a different story. Even the supposedly simple number puzzles -- in the same elementary workbooks as the logic puzzles -- have always baffled me. It's not that I'm bad at maths, It's just that there are some areas that I've never been strong in. Like, all of algebra. It doesn't help that for two years (Algebra II and Pre-Cal/Trigonometry) I had the world's worst maths teacher. It was so bad that, one day when she was out sick and her husband (a computer programmer of some variety) came in as a substitute, we actually learned more in a single day from him than in a week from her. It was so bad that Anders, who taught us Calculus in my final year, spent the whole first month of the class catching us up on the things she should have taught us.

I suppose it shouldn't have been much of a surprise, then, that logic became so much more difficult for me once it reached the convergence point with higher maths, which seems to be essentially what this course is. Unfortunately, it's been not only incredibly poorly taught, but apparently relying on us knowing things that some of us have simply never been taught. The whole course is based largely on mathematical induction, but the technique (though heavily used) was never actually taught at any point in the course. We've all been struggling and scraping along, getting hints and tips here and there but I don't think I'm alone in not understanding the fundamentals of it at all. In the review lecture, at the very end, Dr Read gave a paradigmatic example of mathematical induction, to illustrate the concept. "You weren't taught this in school?" he asked, and four of six heads shook slowly, a little bewildered.

It's utterly frustrating; I don't know how many times I've fallen to tears over this course. I broke down just writing this. I know a lot of it is just that I put to much of a personal stake in my academic performance. It's just that academics have always been the only thing I've been really good at, and lacking a general self-esteem I've come to derive a sense of self-worth from academic success. Well, I'll defer to Gary Larson on the merits of that.

It's not just the injured self-worth, though, nor even primarily. The frustration of not understanding is mostly what I've been crying over. I remember once spending over three hours in Anders' apartment, in a similar state of emotional distress, getting his help on the 'challenge problem' he'd set me for Calculus. After about an hour he realised that Shannon (the abovementioned terrible maths teacher) had never taught us some important prerequisite concept, which he then had to teach me before I could actually start working on the problem. Back then, the stakes were so low. I was already accepted to St Andrews, the class was pass/fail and I could almost certainly have at least passed without doing the challenge problem. But that's not how I roll; it was the principle of the thing, and it was terribly distressing to feel unable to do it. Now the stakes are quite high: this class will determine 1/8 of my entire degree classification. I feel so fundamentally confused that I don't know if I can do anything on the damn exam. And there's no Anders' apartment I can run to this time. The idea of bothering Dr Read, or even our tutor, Walter, outside of normal hours seems ridiculous. I don't even feel really comfortable going to Walter (again) for help during office hours; I'm embarrassed by how little I understand.

My granddad once told me that in his first year at university, he took a chemistry class that was, he said, the hardest thing he'd ever done. He recalled thinking that, if he managed to pass that class, he could do anything at all; nothing in his life could ever be so difficult. I feel the same way now: this class is the hardest thing I have ever done, and if I make it through I doubt anything will feel difficult again. If I make it through.