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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2ceY1oj:
galadhir reblogged your post and added:
I did take physics for A level and I got a U, which is basically as embarrassing a fail as you can possibly get. I understood the principles of what the maths was trying to express, but I couldn’t see how the formulae fitted to that. Which meant that I couldn’t work them out as I went along, and I had to try to memorize them when none of the symbols meant anything to me. (And I couldn’t remember them, because, like you, I can’t remember numbers. That was a problem in History too!)
It was horrifying to go from someone who was good at the sciences to suddenly being someone so stupid it was as if they weren’t even speaking the same language as the rest of the class. So you may have been spared two years of pure incomprehension and despair :)
I remember later doing really well in Philosophy at Uni (to the point where they asked me to stay and do a Masters,) but still not being able to follow a symbolic logic course, because it was expressed in formulae rather than in language.
Yeah…. that’s probably what would have happened. (At least in the US we don’t just have the A level specializations, so it would’ve just been a one year less-intensive course.) (I took A-levels, actually, and they wouldn’t let me into the politics & economics one! because I only attended the second year of the class! for a school with an exchange program that I was definitely not the first to attend in, they really didn’t understand that a US AP exam with a score of 5 (perfect) in a closely-related subject was probably adequate to give me the background knowledge to complete an A-level in half the time? So I only sat two A-levels, in English and European History, got As in both, and not a single US college had any idea what that meant or cared about it, because I already had 5′s in AP exams in the same subjects, and they didn’t give a shit because I had no math classes at all.) (Honestly I can’t believe how little any universities gave a shit about any of the stuff my high school advisors had me just about kill myself to do.)
Anyway. I probably would have been miserable, you’re right, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to bludgeon myself into understanding algebra with the blunt-force trauma of practical physics. I was head of the Science Club instead, and much good it did me.
galadhir reblogged your post and added:
I did take physics for A level and I got a U, which is basically as embarrassing a fail as you can possibly get. I understood the principles of what the maths was trying to express, but I couldn’t see how the formulae fitted to that. Which meant that I couldn’t work them out as I went along, and I had to try to memorize them when none of the symbols meant anything to me. (And I couldn’t remember them, because, like you, I can’t remember numbers. That was a problem in History too!)
It was horrifying to go from someone who was good at the sciences to suddenly being someone so stupid it was as if they weren’t even speaking the same language as the rest of the class. So you may have been spared two years of pure incomprehension and despair :)
I remember later doing really well in Philosophy at Uni (to the point where they asked me to stay and do a Masters,) but still not being able to follow a symbolic logic course, because it was expressed in formulae rather than in language.
Yeah…. that’s probably what would have happened. (At least in the US we don’t just have the A level specializations, so it would’ve just been a one year less-intensive course.) (I took A-levels, actually, and they wouldn’t let me into the politics & economics one! because I only attended the second year of the class! for a school with an exchange program that I was definitely not the first to attend in, they really didn’t understand that a US AP exam with a score of 5 (perfect) in a closely-related subject was probably adequate to give me the background knowledge to complete an A-level in half the time? So I only sat two A-levels, in English and European History, got As in both, and not a single US college had any idea what that meant or cared about it, because I already had 5′s in AP exams in the same subjects, and they didn’t give a shit because I had no math classes at all.) (Honestly I can’t believe how little any universities gave a shit about any of the stuff my high school advisors had me just about kill myself to do.)
Anyway. I probably would have been miserable, you’re right, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to bludgeon myself into understanding algebra with the blunt-force trauma of practical physics. I was head of the Science Club instead, and much good it did me.
