I haven’t met my limits formally because I knew who the usual suspects were going to be and stayed far, far away from them. Like many others mentioned, I was terrified of college level chemistry and I wanted no part of it so I didn’t take it. I saw otherwise brilliant pre-med students crash and burn so hard at organic chemistry that it was time to pick a new career. My SIL is smart and she not only flunked organic chemistry at her prestigious college, she flunked it in community college in the summer and had to take it a third time barely passing with a ‘D’.
I want nothing to do with any type of math as well. It doesn’t matter what it is with only one exception. At first glance of the curriculum, it looked like you had to take a higher math course at my university. I was sweating bullets. I carefully examined the requirements and discovered that I could take a course in Pascal programming to fulfill them requirement as well. That I could do and I got the highest grade in the class and some people bombed out of that one.
The one exception to the higher math I could do was statistics. This was a large, hard-core, stats class that met more often than other classes and required a lab with lots of formal homework. I took to it like a duck to water and got the highest grade in the class as well as in my stats class in graduate school. That was my biggest academic shocker that I would have never predicted. Sometimes I wonder if would have worked out well for the other classes that I avoided but I do not think so.
College level Spanish. I switched majors from a BA to a BS program where 12 additional hours of maths were required to get away from the foreign language requirement of the BA program.
I guess I’m not the first to have gotten a rude awakening with Organic Chemistry. It was my second year of college and I had had a pretty good go of it so far. Physics, calculus, stats, the “weed-out” zoology class for the pre-meds–no real problems with those. I had mostly “A’s” throughout high school and college, certainly nothing as low as a “C.”
The first organic, I got a “C” and the only reason had to have been that the professor felt sorry for me. I think my average based on exam scores was a 50. I certainly didn’t understand the material. And I studied my ass off. Never missed a class. Second organic was a complete disaster. I ended up with a charitable “D.” Sure, I saw the writing on the wall and could have dropped the class, but to me, taking a “W” was a sign of defeat. Certainly, if I applied myself I should be able to understand this, right? Wrong.
I mean, I pulled “A’s” in harder classes (neurophysiology, vertebrate physiology, comparative anatomy), but it was Organic Chemistry that taught me that there were limits to what I could learn and that effort and force of will could not overcome it.
It seems that Calculus is the great leveler on this thread. I am in that camp as well. Funny thing is that in the 30 years since that event, outside of college I have never found a use for Calc in my life - period. So why did I need all that Calculus except to keep the math professors employed? Oh yeah - to round me out. I remember. (I am somewhat round now, so I guess that worked).
I made it through Calculus okay, but the Differential Equations class I took the second half of my freshman year was a killer. Luckily for me, not only were we on pass fail freshman year, but the strike protesting the incursion in Cambodia was on. I happily showed up for every class, and managed to pass, though luckily I never had to use the stuff again.
And, DanBlather, losing out to an MIT student is just pitiful - unless the ones today are a lot more with it than when I was there.
QFT, except I remember when: A friend tried to teach me Go. I could’ve learned it, but the headache from trying to cram it into my head wasn’t worth it. On the other hand, the headache from trying to teach myself Japanese is (which I’ve gotten distracted from… again…).
I knew I was in the presence of Real Smarts when I found this thing called Shavian, an alternative alphabet for English, on the net one Wednesday night. I emailed a link to my friend and he was fluently using it to take notes the following weekend when I saw him. :eek:
This same friend and I started learning Esperanto at the same time and he was fluent in six months. While studying mathematics at Waterloo. And learning Bulgarian to impress this girl he met. Who is now his girlfriend. It’s eight years later and I still trip over stuff in Esperanto.
Having had a mother who convinced me I was to dumb to fart without help, I grew up convinced I could learn nothing. Everytime I learn anything about anything, I am amazed.
When I finished my fourth grade year, my teacher told my mother I was super bright and should be in the the AT class the following year. He was a really great teacher and I did well in his class. His main reason for recommending IQ testing for me was that I was constantly reading books during class and he was constantly trying to “catch” me doing it by asking my questions about what he was talking about. Since I had also already read all of the textbooks and had a good ear, I never got caught and always gave the correct answer. But I was just a little below the correct score on the IQ test- don’t know what the requirement was but they said I was just under it. I figured out in high school that if it was something I could learn by reading about it- it would be mine forever but math and science (especially geometry and chemistry) just left me scratching my head and too bored to care.
What makes math hard for some people? To me it seems like just learning a process. If you see 4/2=x (to use a simple example) you count the number of times 2 goes into 4. I guess where I reach my limits is when the process of finding the solution becomes so complex that I either make a mistake in keeping track of the process or I am unable to calculate part of the process without the aid of a calculator or computer or something (ie SQRT( 461464 ) ).
Why can’t some people spell? Why can’t everybody speak Mandarin? They’re just processes, too. For me, calculus was when math went from logical and useful to dense and useless in my life. I have never wanted to be anybody who would use calculus at all, so it became a wall I wasn’t willing to invest the effort into breaching. I’ve never missed it.
Sometime in grad school, possibly the year that I tried to learn Czech. (I still occasionally have anxiety dreams where I discover that I am enrolled in an advanced Czech course and have not attended class all semester.) Or possibly when I realized I had lost nearly all of the Latin that I learned over the first three years of grad school. (Learning languages usually comes easily to me; retaining them is another matter.)
This was my undoing as well. The first two weeks of the class, we had nice “John is taller than Mary; Mary is taller than Jane” types of problems. No problem. After that (i.e., after the drop/add period), it was all geometric proofs (and not the fun kind we had in high school) and set theory and things I never understood and couldn’t possibly recall now. I was miserable and it was the only class I’ve ever failed.
I loved doing proofs in high school geometry and trigonometry, so I thought this class would be a joy. No. Worse, I was the only one in the class who couldn’t follow the professor. Ugh.
But trying to wrap my head around currency exchange rates - even after an hour or two on wikipedia, I still have no clue what actually makes the dollar strong or weak other than the economists telling me where it is at any given time.
…I think my brain just lacks the “Macro Economics” plugin.
