OK, more from my school journal. (the Anime reference was getting tired) As readers of this blog know, I have been steeling myself for battle with the dragon that is MATH all this summer. Today was my first class, and I basically wound up with the Math Teacher From Hell.
Imagine this: you are already quite nervous about taking the class, and you wind up sitting in the wrong room waiting for a tardy teacher who is NOT your teacher. You are in the wrong room, and the right teacher has been teaching in the right room for exactly 10 minutes.
Why, perchance, is this teacher the Teacher From Hell? OK, maybe part of the reason has nothing to do with him specifically...I made the mistake of taking a class which meets only one day a week, and he has to teach at an absolutely breakneck pace. The guy also doesn't believe in review AT ALL and skipped an entire chapter to make sure that the stuff he thinks is VITALLY IMPORTANT is covered in the VERY FIRST CLASS.
And to make it even harder for me to follow him, he had an extremely thick accent. It could be Middle-Eastern, it could be Persian, it could be Armenian, it could be Balkan, it could even be Eastern European. But whatever it was, it was interfering strongly with my ability to follow a class hurtling along at a speedcore pace.
Anyway, by the time the midpoint of the class came, and we had a break, I literally ran into the Math department office and burst into tears. Not a problem, don't worry, said the Profs who were there at the time. There were plenty of opportunities to do a section transfer.
And offhand they knew one in particular would be somewhat immune to the crunch in class availability that has been experienced all around Los Angeles Valley College...the one which basically is taught by Prof. Pentium II in the Math Lab. I had remembered the "self-paced math lab" description in the course catalog and thought...ok, that might be a semi-painless way to ease into my most hated subject...but somehow or another I forgot all about it when I requested my classes.
On Monday I will talk to the Prof who is supervising that particular section of Math 112 and it is fairly assured that I will have no problems getting in. I have my book for the new section already. It wasn't too expensive, luckily, so I didn't go bargain hunting on the Net like I did with the other books.
I hope this all works, because it would really set me back if I couldn't get a math class this semester.
Additional note 9/6/2003: I also may have been walking around with an undiagnosed learning disability all my life. There *is* such a thing as Dyscalculia, which is a catchall term for mathematical learning disabilities. There are parts of this academic paper which read like the story of my life. It could hold insights into the reason why I have a hard time with math, so much so that I have been avoiding it for the majority of my life.
I might be on the verge of a very interesting discovery. I'll keep you all posted.