(no subject)

[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

[ahsu.livejournal.com]

I used to complain that higher math was a cakewalk, but simple elementary arithmetic was going to be the death of me. Don't assume you're a math idiot just because simple calculation errors trip you up. Far better to get the wrong answer because somewhere along the line you assumed that 2 + 2 = 5 than to get the wrong answer because you have no idea what you're doing.

If you can, try tackling math when you're not already tired, and definitely take a break when you start feeling like your head is stuck on a sine wave (ceiling - whack! floor - whack! ceiling - whack!).

Something that I found helpful when I was struggling with calculus was to slow down and pay careful attention to the parts of the problem that were not calculus -- the simple calculation parts, that is. Making sure that "x" went from negative to positive when moving from one side of the equation to the other, trying to avoid the simple arithmetic errors, and so forth.

Also try working problems backward (not always possible, but often very useful) to see if you will get back to where you started or not. If not, then somewhere along the way you've made an error, and you can go look for it. I find this helps to avoid the pitfall of simply reworking the problem, which is that I often make the same error twice in a row, leaving me with the happy feeling that I've gotten it right when in fact I have made scrambled eggs out of it.

"I assure you your problems with mathematics are nothing compared to mine." Albert Einstein, the smart aleck!

[chess]

*grins at the mental image of making scrambled eggs out of maths notes*