Honours Maths: I’m no mathemagician…

…and that’s exactly why I don’t really mind what grade I get in maths as long as I pass. I was wrecked last night and decided to indulge in an early night, on my way to bed I passed by the living room where Big Brother was on, and that pretty much ruined all my plans of an early night. Normally I’d invent some educational reason for watching Big Brother, but this was pure entertainment and I couldn’t drag myself away from the Pakistani lady who looks like a witch and some girl who calls herself “Angel”, yet looks like a cross between Willy Wonka and the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

To make up for my shameless lack of maths study I set my alarm for 7 to do some last minute cramming. I dutifully dragged myself out of bed, had a shower, and spent the rest of the morning curled up in a ball on the couch feeling sorry for myself before getting sick, just half an hour before the exam started. Not a good start.

Luckily my mum is in Power Parent mode and rushed to the pharmacy to pick up Motilium and glucose sweets. She drove me down to the school and a potential crisis was avoided. Ok complete exaggeration, nothing bad was going to happen, but it was a damn annoying thing to happen just before an exam.

The minute I got my answer booklet I scribbled down all the formulae I could remember and also scrawled “+c” around the place to make sure I didn’t forget. I was so determined not to lose those pesky 3 marks that I flicked straight to the integration question to scrawl +c all over it, when to my delight I saw the volume of a cone derivation. As a C part. For 20 marks. That cheered me up no end and got me right into exam mode. The paper was fine, but then again, I’m never going to describe an honours maths paper as “wonderful” seeing as I’m barely an honours maths student. All I can say is there have been much nastier ones before. My algebra question probably wasn’t as good as it should have been; I mainly just tinkered around with the letters, dividing, multiplying and backwardsing them until I got something that looked like a vaguely correct answer. Sequences and series was always going to be my weakness, but I was happy enough with the question asked, even if the c part was a little dodgey. Calculus was alright, I think I got that weird Newton Raphson question, even if I didn’t do much maths and instead wrote down a few sentences with => to indicate I was using logic. If you read between the lines what they really wanted us to prove was that girls are bad at maths.

So that’s half of maths over and done with. It’s a wonderful feeling to think that I will probably never have to do proper maths again, unless I don’t get medicine or Human Health and disease and end up doing science.

While now I’m completely over the whole English Paper two debacle (or “twittergate” as the media so wittily call it- not realising that not many teenagers even use twitter) it has somewhat messed with my study plans. While I should be studying for all of next week’s subjects, I can’t tear myself away from English and at this stage every day’s study counts.

9 thoughts on “Honours Maths: I’m no mathemagician…”

  1. BBs gone all international this time round.
    And the Willy Wonka child catcher hybrid is the stuff of my nightmares.

  2. Did it?! I really wanna see the American one with heidi and spencer. The hills in the jungle!

  3. Ironic that you want to be a doc and got sick… Ah.. I need to stop reading Macbeth lol.

    Let’s all keep it deceived.

    Laters

  4. Happarently I’m a Celeb started last night too…
    Both ridiculous. Both perfect for not studying to.
    😉

  5. Ah, Elizabeth, that really sucks. I hope it was a once off and you’re better off for the rest of them!
    I felt really sick this afternoon between Maths and Geography- I honestly thought I was going to end up getting sick when I was out dossing away in the park with everyone looking on. I think it was just nerves though, in my case. And the fact that the sandwich I bought had raw peppers in it- WTF? Yock.

    Good luck tomorrow!

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