athenian200
Well-known member
I've been taking a Trigonometry class over Winter Term, and it hasn't been working out that well.
I've been studying very hard, and getting 100% on all the assigned homework. But I'm doing poorly on in-class quizzes, and I'm making B's instead of A's on my tests despite knowing the material fairly well.
The thing is, I always recognize the mistakes in my mind's eye right after I get home, but they aren't apparent to me while I'm in class.
I would normally think it was just my study habits, but the class average was 71... so everyone else is actually doing worse than I am.
I'm just wondering why it feels like I'm having to fight so hard to do well.
Here are some odd things I wanted to note about the class:
Another thing I should note about Winter Term is that it's basically supposed to be covering an entire semester of material in 12 class sessions that are 3.5 hours long, lasting from 9:00AM to 12:30PM.
We are out of school until January 5th, where we come back for a final week. I would be studying right now, but MyMathLab is down for a scheduled upgrade for the next few hours.
One thing that's been bothering me about the class is that, on tests and quizzes, I'm expected to show every step of my work carefully, and in a specific format. The thing is, the online homework doesn't adequately prepare me for that, because the computer only requires me to enter a correct answer in order to receive credit.
Worse, the online homework is often so predictable that it's easy to get into a "rhythm" where I see patterns and enter a correct answer immediately without really thinking about what I'm doing, finishing all my homework within an hour or two (when it should take several hours).
I normally wouldn't think much about Astrology while doing Math, but Astrological symbolism keeps getting thrown in my face. I get asked questions about the radius/speed of planets in the solar system, the textbook keeps making references to Ptolemy, the Babylonians, the Greeks, and the Egyptians, and there's a lot of talk about 90 degree, 60 degree, and 180 degree angles in relation to imaginary triangles and circles.
Anyway... here's a chart I cast for the beginning of this class, since I was bored.
The first thing that jumps out at me as a potentially negative energy for a Math class is that Mercury and the Sun are in the 12th house in Sagittarius, and I personally tend to find that Jupiter influences aren't the best thing for Mathematics (although I'm sure some people would disagree).
So, do you see the difficulties associated with the class represented in the chart, or are all the difficulties related to other factors like MyMathLab being inadequate, the abbreviated schedule, and the teacher being overwhelmed?
All I can say is that for some reason, I feel that my performance in this class isn't representative of my actual capabilities, and that I could easily be doing a lot better in a different class.
I've been studying very hard, and getting 100% on all the assigned homework. But I'm doing poorly on in-class quizzes, and I'm making B's instead of A's on my tests despite knowing the material fairly well.
The thing is, I always recognize the mistakes in my mind's eye right after I get home, but they aren't apparent to me while I'm in class.
I would normally think it was just my study habits, but the class average was 71... so everyone else is actually doing worse than I am.
I'm just wondering why it feels like I'm having to fight so hard to do well.
Here are some odd things I wanted to note about the class:
- The teacher had trouble finding the classroom on the first day, even though he taught in that classroom every day last semester.
- The class computers and PowerPoint presentations are failing for odd reasons, and I have the only hard copy of the textbook in the whole class, so he often has to ask for my book to help him teach the class.
- We're frequently interrupted by these weird jackhammer-like noises and having to move between classrooms to avoid the noise.
- The last-minute questions I ask the teacher before a test often make him recognize that he made a typo on the review or failed to cover a subject he talked about adequately in our homework, so he takes 15 minutes at the start of class to cover it one more time before the test.
Another thing I should note about Winter Term is that it's basically supposed to be covering an entire semester of material in 12 class sessions that are 3.5 hours long, lasting from 9:00AM to 12:30PM.
We are out of school until January 5th, where we come back for a final week. I would be studying right now, but MyMathLab is down for a scheduled upgrade for the next few hours.
One thing that's been bothering me about the class is that, on tests and quizzes, I'm expected to show every step of my work carefully, and in a specific format. The thing is, the online homework doesn't adequately prepare me for that, because the computer only requires me to enter a correct answer in order to receive credit.
Worse, the online homework is often so predictable that it's easy to get into a "rhythm" where I see patterns and enter a correct answer immediately without really thinking about what I'm doing, finishing all my homework within an hour or two (when it should take several hours).
I normally wouldn't think much about Astrology while doing Math, but Astrological symbolism keeps getting thrown in my face. I get asked questions about the radius/speed of planets in the solar system, the textbook keeps making references to Ptolemy, the Babylonians, the Greeks, and the Egyptians, and there's a lot of talk about 90 degree, 60 degree, and 180 degree angles in relation to imaginary triangles and circles.
Anyway... here's a chart I cast for the beginning of this class, since I was bored.
The first thing that jumps out at me as a potentially negative energy for a Math class is that Mercury and the Sun are in the 12th house in Sagittarius, and I personally tend to find that Jupiter influences aren't the best thing for Mathematics (although I'm sure some people would disagree).
So, do you see the difficulties associated with the class represented in the chart, or are all the difficulties related to other factors like MyMathLab being inadequate, the abbreviated schedule, and the teacher being overwhelmed?
All I can say is that for some reason, I feel that my performance in this class isn't representative of my actual capabilities, and that I could easily be doing a lot better in a different class.
