I wanna talk about Math...

So, Math. I've always loved Math. It was probably my best subject growing up. I took Calculus my senior year, but didn't pass the AP test due to a severe case of senioritis. So then, at BYU I took Math 119 to earn the college credit. And that was it. My math days were over. I do remember though that there were a lot of returned missionaries in my class. All of them were trying to get into the business school. I was 18 years old, and cruising in this class since I had learned everything in high school. Then I would watch my fellow classmates struggle and look to me for answers, which I thought was strange because they were a lot older than me. But, they had also not looked at a single math problem for potentialy 4 to 5 years depending on their situation. So this brings me to my point: Sean is one of those guys. 5 years later, he's taking a math class, but it's not just a review of stuff he learned in high school, he's expected to remember everything from high school and then build upon it. The difficulty of taking math in high school and spending an entire school year on 12 chapters pales in comparison to trying to do it in 6 weeks or even an entire semester. To make it worse, I'm not very useful. I took calculus and did great in the class, but now I look at a slightly more complicated algebra problem and stare at it blankly with no ideas as to how to solve it. The last two weeks I've tried to help him more to help him feel like he's not totally on his own in this battle, and my skills have gotten better, but I'm still running into problems that go something like this in my head, " Wait, do I add or multiply these exponents? How exactly do I get rid of this square root? and Is this allowed? or did I just make that rule up?" I've also realized that Sean and I also have different ways of making sense of the problems we solve. So he'll try to explain things to me, and I to him, and both of us feel like the other just said something in a different language. But in the end, we'll often come up with the same answer to a problem. haha.

I remember at BYU that the general education requirement titled "Languages of Learning" had two options for fulfillment. #1: take Calc or Stats or #2 take a 205 level of a foriegn language. I was always so lost as to why math and languages would fulfill the same requirement. What the heck do they have to do with eachother? Now, I've made the connection . . . Once you've stopped studying them they basically leave your brain as quick as they arrived. I would know, I've studied quite a bit of both and I'm pretty sure my ability to remember Spanish is about as good as my ability to remember math. Or maybe I should say that my ability to remember Spanish is about as bad as my ability to remember math. Either way, they're both deep down in there somehwere. :)