Can I join the college math support group? I got B’s in math through high school as far as trig, then I went to art school and got a fine arts degree and have lived the last thirtymumble years without ever taking math again. My checkbook is always balanced, I can figure out roughly what a sale price is or how much it will cost to fence the yard or paint the room, I can do artsy fartsy math for proportional drawings and geometric constructions. I have all the math I need for life as it I now know it. Which never includes having to raise things to negative powers or disentangle nested parentheses.
Then I decided to go back and get into medical illustration. So I have to take sciences (which I love). And as C.S. Lewis observed, “the gate to the sciences is guarded by the great lion Mathematics.” If I want Organic Chem, I must pass math. Rowr. I took a placement test and managed to qualify for College Algebra, but I fear that was a fluke. I signed up for Introduction to Algebra (basically high school stuff) so I could have my hand held all the way through. There is another “non-traditional” student a little older than I am in the class and the rest all appear to have wandered in off the street and look bewildered at how they got there. I haven’t a clue, either.
Now I am going to turn off this damn computer and go do some problems. Really. I am. Honest.