Just finished the second algebra quiz in Math this morning. It took me just under ten minutes to complete, because it covered the material for just this week. I was actually afraid it was going to be a little more complicated than simplification and negative/positive integers, covering some of the commutative, associative, and distributive property rules that we had to go over in detail. Part of the homework this week was covering different solutions and trying to find out exactly what kind of rule they obey. I actually got one wrong last night when I was doing the last section of my homework for this week, and so I went back to the class notes I took that day and just sat down and finally understood that I wasn’t going to be able to breeze as easily through the class as I had originally thought.
While I was sitting through the last five minutes allotted for the quiz, the guy next to me pulls out a calculator to cheat on the quiz. The instructor had said three times before the quiz started that calculators weren’t allowed, which is fine by me. Most of this crap is addition and basic multiplication. And I think I remember how to add double-digit numbers without much difficulty. One of the problems was -6^2 + 5(8-3) / 4-12. the answer ends up being 36 + 25 / -8, and then simplified to -7 and 2/8. This guy whips out a calculator to add 36 to 25, and I just shake my head because he pulls it out under his desk, and I feel like I’m back in high school again, watching others cheat on the geometry final. Gah.
I got my homework assignment back from Tuesday. I got 20 out of 20. Yay me.
Damn, that’s lame. Why are you taking a class like this in the first place? Give me the quick-‘n’-dirty version, so I don’t have to wade through pages and pages of journal entries to figure it out 😉
I passed Geometry in High School, but this was like almost a decade ago. And as with all knowledge, if you don’t use it, you lose it. When I went into Foothill for the first time in the Fall of 99, I had to take the language and mathematics placement exams prior to registration. Unfortunately, having not studied any math beyond your basic checkbook crap and other pre-algebra functions, I placed in Math 101, otherwise known as Beginning Algebra or Algebra I. Now, it took me two tries to pass Algebra I in high school, while it took three tries in high school to pass Geometry. Math is not my strong suit, which is why I’m not a Comp Sci major or even a Math major. I’m a liberal arts major, which means math sucks. 😉
— ZC
Fair ’nuff… had a similar experience myself. The first and foremost reason that I wasn’t Comp Sci was that I couldn’t, for the life of me, get through Calculus II — a requirement for both a Comp Sci major AND a minor at my university. Oh well.
Well, the minimum math I need for being a Japanese major is Math 10 (Statistics). Though, my counselor suggested I heavily consider the Calculus course. But… the thing is, that the path for math for calculus is
Math 101 (Algebra I) -> Math 105 (Algebra II) -> Math 102 (Geometry) -> Math 51 (Trig) -> Math 49 (Pre-Calc -> Math 1A (Calc I).
That’s ridiculous, and would put me in math every quarter I’m in school. Instead, I’ll just do stats, which is
Math 101 -> Math 105 -> Math 10 (Elementary Statistics)
And then I’m done with math for my degree. The AA for Japanese only requires Math 105, but I need Math 10 to transfer to SFSU.
— ZC