Thursday, March 1, 2012

Mathematical Stress

Today in Algebra, we had an 18 point quiz. It was on monomials, and since I had some trouble understanding it, I studied for a long time. I was prepared...or so I thought.

As the bell rang, my teacher walked into the classroom, and said "Everything off your desks, quiz time." Whenever a math teacher hands out a quiz, I panic. It's only with math. I doubt myself so much (in math) that I go into PANIC MODE when a quiz is handed out. I freak out and forget everything I learned. It sucks.

I got the quiz, and was happy to see it was easy, but surprised to not see a single negative monomial. As I neared the end of the quiz, a few of the problems had answers that were negative, in which I'd transfer to positive. No biggie. But, you see, for the negative monomial, I wasn't sure whether to subtract via denominator or numerator. Except I wasn't sure of exactly how to subtract. And so I tried the first possible way, and continued on with my test.

**three minutes later**

Me: What?! Only two negative answers?!! This can't be correct. *goes on to re-check answers*
-----ah, must have subtracted wrong. Or not. Or yes. Ugh. Well, I probably did it wrong, because I always do math wrong. *changes answers*

And when I turned in my quiz, relatively unsure about the above predicament, I got out my notes to see if I did it right.

I didn't.

And now, I'm horrified of not only the teacher yelling at me, but the re-take. It's not that I hate re-taking stuff, but by the time I re-take it, I'm paranoid that I'll forget all the rules. The reason I freak out on these tests is because I am so doubtful of myself in math. Contrary to a fifth grade math teacher's theory, I don't have some panicky-test syndrome...well, I do, but only in math.

I can't think of ANYTHING else. I hate being stressed.

The word 'I' started practically every sentence in this post. I'm not asking for sympathy. I am just telling the story of my day. Which, technically, shouldn't even exist--given this quiz was taken on February the 29th.

EDIT:


weeeeeee!

No comments:

Post a Comment