Mathmatical Meltdown

That settles it. I am officially, completely frustrated with Algebra. I felt that I had been making some real progress these last couple weeks. Putting in twice as much study time, and was actually enjoying it. Netted a 100% on the online quiz provided by my instructor, and an 89% on the practice test (which is technically supposed to be a replication of the actual test). Studied some more, and entered into this morning's test really feeling that I was certain to get a 90%+, and optimistic of a possible 4.0

Negative. What I did manage to dredge out of it was a 79%. To be honest, I am being really hard on myself about this. I just don't know what is wrong with me. Math is the only type of learning I have a rough time with, and the only type of course that I consistently get poor marks in. It seems the harder I study, the worse I do! I will say this though, there were two concepts present on the test, that were not, and I mean absolutely, beyond the shadow of any doubt, covered throughout any of our sessions during the two weeks leading up to exam #2. It is almost as if they design it for you to do poorly.

What do I mean by this? Well, sneaking in new material aside, it is things like this:
6b, 4y, 2z, t+. These simple terms may seem like nothing special to you, as you view them in a typed font, but write them down several hundred times, using a pencil, and after a while, your 6's begin to look a lot like your lower case b's. So on, and so forth. So, even if the test was not designed to be "tricky," over time, one stands the chance of sabotaging oneself, through sheer volume of repetition of terms that have no sensical need to be expressed as such.

Ah well, we all have our Achilles Heel, mine happens to be mathematics.

Sanguine Saturday

Sage and I started reading The Prince and the Pauper tonight. Having recently finished Samuel Clemens' (Mark Twain is his pen name of course ^^) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (yes, only just now) it seemed the pertinent thing to do; compare his adult oriented writing to that which was created for children. The two stories are vastly different in every way. Where as Huck' Finn is a celebration of dialectic exploration, Prince & Pauper seems to be methodically designed to be utterly bland. But hey, I am not 8 years old and Sagey is, and she is loving every minute of it, so I am all about it vicariously!

Other then that, today was rather uneventful. We did a bit of Tae-bo "Cardio," as a family, and followed it up with Stacy's yoga routine (which is certainly gaining in popularity amongst the riff-raff). Played some Everquest2, and put in several hours on my Algebra... (plan on taking test 2 this Tuesday). In fact, currently working on Factoring, which, is really quite fun..! It is very, very weird to be doing mathematics that continually bombard me with de'ja'vu's of 9th grade; but hey, in my case I didn't use it, and thus, I lo(o)s(e)t it.