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[chess]

I am *so* never doing a straight maths degree. Just spent a couple of hours on some perfectly trivial maths because I kept being swamped in all my stupid calculation errors. Grr. (Still haven't finished it - I gave up when I started crying and worrying my parents. I guess it'll get done (badly) on the train to school tomorrow - that's stupid of me too, but I don't care right now.)

I just don't know what to *do* about all these silly errors - after all, proofreading your own maths thorougly is impossible as proofreading your own typing for errors, at least it seems to be for me. Then again, it *isn't* - it's just these two questions I was trying to do tonight really that I managed to fill so full of errors I just couldn't seem to catch them all. But as that's the latest bit of maths I've done, and I can think of a few examples of similar from the past, of course I consider it to be an example of all the work I've ever done, despite the fact that if I was *that* rubbish at addition and multiplication I'd never have got A* at GCSE (although remember, I didn't actually get that by a lot...).

I guess it just frustrates me that everyone else has lots of trouble grasping the concepts, which I normally do pretty easily, but they still get better marks than me because they can add. Not being able to add (well, I can normally spot addition errors in the kind of numbers we're using, it's the multiplication and division with fractions in it that I think I know well enough to do automatically and don't) would be a really dumb reason to fail (where fail = get a B in a module).

Comments

[pling.livejournal.com]

I quite often had that problem with A-level math stuff, the algebra was quite easy, just the arithmetic tripped me up. For a while, till I got better at it, I'd write down in pencil at the side of each line what arithmetic operation I'd done to get from one line to the next (ie x2 or /5 or whatever). And I'd do each one seperately, no x2/5 do the multiplication then the division. It's easier to find the silly mistake that way. Also, try and do it a couple of nights before it's due, and go and proof read the night before. Makes it easier to spot things if you give it a break.