THAT Class

Focus: Accounting was always a bitch for me. Financial and managerial were 2 of the first business related courses I took in college, and financial was especially difficult. Remembering all of the different rules and how things were related was so tough for me. I was usually pretty good at rote memorization, but because I had no prior experience in accounting, it was completely different. The problem I had was I would try to cram 4 weeks worth of material into 3 days of studying. I learned pretty damn quickly that this would NOT fly.

 

Math killed my average every year in high school. Not because I couldn't get the right answers, but because I couldn't get to them the way my teachers wanted me to. Each question on a test would be worth 3 points, with only 1 point awarded for the correct answer. There were very few answers I'd get wrong in the end, but my math grade would consistently hover between a 70-75%.

I couldn't for the life of me wrap my brain around the techniques they wanted us to use to solve the problem, they always seemed unnecessarily complex to me. I'd spend 6 hours a week outside class with a tutor going over the same procedures over and over and over again, but it was like my brain was hardwired to see my method and my method only. If I actually managed to memorize the 'proper' procedure, it would look so alien to me that I thought there was no way it could be right, even though the answer was correct.

I dropped out of uni for unrelated reasons before taking any really challenging math, thank god.

 

Screw you, Chater, I'm putting History!

Well, no. But in high school, I failed in any memorization only class. And for me this wasn't actually history but biology. The reason I sucked at it was not laziness but ADD.

My bio teacher would lecture and we were supposed to right down what he said word for word. He.... talked..... like...... this........ so..... we...... could...... have time to write every single word. It was annoying as all get out. Then the test would be, two side-by-side lists of sentences from the lecture. And we were supposed to match up the sentences that fit together. It was the worst class ever. Period.

I tried studying for it the same way I studied for every class, but it didn't work. It was too different from anything I'd experienced before. And I couldn't just sit and read and re-read and re-read until I memorized an entire lecture. ADD will do that to you. It was my only C of high school.

 

Focus: Shop. I am mechanically retarded, and there really is no way around it. I asked my parents for some basic tools for Christmas, and they laughed at me, and said just to call if something was fucked up. I can only fix the most basic of problems. I can't do anything remotely complicated. Luckily, my dad and all of my brothers are all great at working with their hands. They've agreed to help me with shit around the house, if I help them tutor their kids when the time comes.

Alt. Focus: Any academic class. I can read something and just get it, and math just makes sense to me. Social Studies, math, English, and science always just kind of came naturally. A minor amount of work got me good grades, and my parents always made me help my little brother with math and science. If I had worked even remotely harder, there is no doubt in my mind that I could've made straight As in high school. Alas, I was lazy as shit in high school, and was content to graduate with a 3.25 GPA. I can honestly say I never spent more than 30 minutes a week on school work at home during all of high school, and most weeks I never did anything at home. If I couldn't finish it in class or in study hall, I just didn't do it.

 

Focus: Any foreign language class. I tried taking French, Spanish, and German at one point or another during high school and failed each one miserably. Learning a foreign language is learning a skill, not an academic knowledge in that the only real way to get better at it is to practice, practice, practice. I don't know what the instructors expected us to learn when we didn't have the opportunity to practice speaking the language on a regular basis and heaven knows I certainly didn't learn anything. I'm just thankful my college didn't have a foreign language requirement.

Alt-Focus: Economics. I love economics; it's the one field where everything I ever learned about it makes intrensic sense to me right from the get go. If only I had realized this seven years sooner and I would've graduated a lot earlier than I did.

 

FOCUS: Math. I was always the kid who never needed to study to ace everything, but one I hit Algebra 2 I was fucking lost. No matter how hard I studied, I couldn't grasp it. Of course, having shitty teachers starting with Pre-Algebra didn't help. The first was corrected by our highest-mark student on a daily basis; and my sophomore Algebra 2 teacher was the type that read from the book, gave two examples, and sat on her ass the rest of the period. If you had a question, she would do the problem on the board without giving any attempt at actually explaining how it worked.

Chemistry was a bitch too. Unfortunately, by the time you get to Chemistry, you're dealing with a lot of math-related stuff, so if you don't have a strong foundation in math, you're kind of lost. That was one class I gave up on relatively easily. I was too busy being a teenage ass and trying to not fail Algebra to worry about learnign the entire Periodic Table of Elements and how a hundred different molecules bond and break and blah blah teach me something that I'll actually use after I graduate high school, thanks.

Alt-Focus: I've never had issues with Literature or History. I've always been an avid reader, and I can write a good paper when I need to. History was frustrating at times - the Roman Empire has been a fascination for me to the point of obsession, but some of the minutiae of other periods is a pain in my ass to read. Regardless, I always absorbed the information easily.

 

Focus: I did an independent study in differential topology my last semester of school, to this day I have no idea what it's application is or really what the fuck I was doing in that 'class.' Luckily it was an independent study, so there were no tests or homework and the prof liked me so I got an A, no way would I have come close to passing otherwise. Had I needed to take regular topology like most of my cohorts I'm not sure I would have graduated college.

I also struggled with pretty much any class that was writing intensive, I would do really well with one pagers where the objective is to just get your ideas out, but with papers that require paragraph to paragraph flow I'm lost. On pretty much every long paper I wrote my last paragraph would be an absolute abortion and my arguments were all over the place with no real cohesiveness.

Alt-Focus: Pretty much all other math courses were right in my wheel house, I would even nail the questions teachers would cherry pick as gifts for the students that showed up to class.

I found Accounting (just basic financial and managerial, I left business school before I got to the advanced classes) to be extremely easy since I can look at things very mechanically. I think the problem most people have with Accounting is trying to interpret things qualitatively instead of looking at debits and credits as plus and minus signs.

 

Focus: Pretty much any science class. I don't know what it is about labs, but I manage to both be inefficient and inept. I also don't have that innate sense of the inner workings of the human body that it seems like some people have. It's weird because I've always been good at math, but never managed an A in any science class I've ever taken.

Alt-focus: Pretty much any writing based class. I read quickly and have good recall for situations, and can connect larger themes without much trouble. I also have an innate knack for clever-but-useless wordplay and verse.

I guess overall I do better with larger concepts than minutae; I've always found finals to be some of the easiest tests a class would give, because they rely on a broad swath of shallow information rather than a deep vein of specific facts.

 

Focus: Physics. My physics teacher was an incredibly sweet and intelligent lady, but couldn't teach worth shit. When I would try to go in for extra help she would say "Why are you here? You have an 84 in this class!" and send me on my way, literally refusing to help me. I realize an 84 doesn't seem like that bad of a mark, but when you're used to getting nothing under a 90, it really is quite traumatic. If I don't get into McGill because of that 84, I will probably have to hunt Mrs. T down.

Alt Focus: Math and English were always super easy for me. I've always enjoyed math; the day I got a graphing calculator was genuinely one of the most exciting moments in my life and I was a mathlete in high school. As for English, I had the best teacher ever. She challenged me to be a better writer and a better person and also had the most beautiful shoe collection I've ever seen. I want to be her when I grow up.

 

Focus: Calculus. I guess math in general was always my weakest subject, although I did fine through high school. However, my first semester of college, I had Calc I and I think I lasted maybe two weeks before I had to drop it. Like others, I (partially) blame my piss-poor high school education. My senior year, I doubled up on Trig and a Pre-calc class. I had a pretty solid trig teacher, but my pre-calculus teacher was just an idiot. One day, I had to make up a trig quiz at lunch, and came in to find my trig teacher literally teaching that afternoon's pre-calc lesson to my pre-calc teacher. Apparently this happened about every day. Our pre-calc lessons were verbatim what the trig teacher had taught her, and it was obvious she was just repeating them with no understanding. We made it maybe 1/3 of the way through the book that year. She was also obsessed with Build-A-Bear and Harry Potter. Fuck was she annoying.

Fast-forward to Calculus class, and on the first day I'm already so far behind I don't even know what the teacher is talking about. That, combined with the fact that I was using my "if it takes actual work, fuck it" method from high school, meant I quickly got out of there. I eventually re-took the class a year or so later and got a C, by the hardest.

As a side note, the professor of my original calc class was a recent Chinese immigrant, and spoke/wrote very poor English, to the point that she would misspell words so badly on the chalkboard nobody in the class could even tell what they were supposed to be. I was so far behind it wouldn't have mattered if she was fluent, but shouldn't basic language skills be a requirement for teaching in that language?

 

Focus:
Calculus. I took the basic, entry level calc course in college twice. The first time I failed it, the second time I got a D-. The second time I vowed that I would go to every available study session, my TA's office hours once a week even if I knew that week's material well, etc. I was going to kick ass.

Nothing helped. I limped through the mid-term and barely made it through the final. The weekly quizzes were better, but not by much. It seemed like no matter how hard I tried, something always came up that threw me off and I was fucked. To this day I'm almost positive that I failed the second time, but my TA recognized how hard I worked and gave me the pity D-. I was never so happy to see a shitty grade in my life.

Alt. Focus:
English, specifically literary analysis and creative writing. This stuff just clicks for me.

 

I have a degree in Physics and a degree in Engineering, so I took lots of math and science classes. I dropped Statistics twice, before finally squeaking by with a looooow C. I have no clue why that never clicked for me.

 

Focus: Literature classes. Anything involving literary analysis is totally lost on me. I just can't place myself into the story or try to "explain the motivations of the character" or "identify major themes" because all I can think about is that the story isn't real, everything we interpret probably isn't what the author meant, and this is all bullshit. It creates a mental block that prevents me from producing any reasonable thought. This isn't a big deal to me because I think literary analysis really is bullshit.

Anti-focus: Game theory and economics. I took a political theories class that was heavily based on game theory—the class average for the midterm was a 65%, I scored a clean 100%. In my international economics class, the class average on the final was an 85%, my score was 102% (aced the test and got the bonus question).

I find this especially interesting because I was terrible at economics my freshman year—I got a 50% on the final exam of my first econ class. Around that time I started reading Marginal Revolution every day, and at first I only understood maybe 10% of what I was reading, but over the course of a few months I could feel my thinking shift toward more rational, calculating thought process.

Anti-focus: Also languages. I credit this partially to growing up bilingually and musically, and partially to my interest in linguistics. Languages come very easily to me—often in a matter of weeks—and at this point I can speak fluently or at least have proficient understanding in 8 languages (including English).

 

I'm terrible at any class involving Literature. I hate reading any and all fiction. As soon as I learn it did not happen in real life, I suddenly have no interest what so ever in it. A lot of times I can't even read the cliff notes on the subject. I could read the same thing 20-30 times and my mind won't grasp what I just read. I think I have a learning disability. I'm fine with books on economics, biographies, history, etc. Becuase of this I had extreme issues with standardized testing.

Guess what whomever in the fuck writes the ACT, I'm never going to have to diagnose themes and motivations in real life BECAUSE I HAVE A REAL FUCKING JOB THAT DOESNT INVOLVE SITTING AROUND AND READING ABOUT WHAT SOME BRITISH MAN DRESSED LIKE A WOMAN THOUGHT BEFORE HIS UNCLE KILLED HIS FATHER. SO STOP JUDGING ME ON THIS.

You may find it shocking that I'm not the biggest Harry Potter fan either.

 

Focus: Art. I really admire people who can draw and paint. Even now if I draw something, it looks like an average 8-year-old did it. I can see that it's completely wrong, but I can't see how to fix it. Gris is better in MSPaint than I am on paper.

Anti-focus: Everything else, especially math, chemistry, and literature. I earned a degree in mechanical engineering with a minor in literature. I took calculus in high school and I fucking loved it. It felt as if a new world had been opened up. An example of how much I loved it: My wife and I were shopping for furniture last summer. At the local Ethan Allen store they had a display with a calculus book open on a desk. My wife had gone on to another room, so I found a pen and solved some of the problems right there in the book. It's been over 20 years since I took calculus. I got A's in all the chemistry courses I took in college, including organic chemistry. I wonder if I chose the right major.

 

Focus: I'm probably the worst Math student in the history of any Asian that's ever taken any math class. Throughout school, (K-12) I never got higher than a B at any level of math. In fact, I never got past Algebra I because I was so goddamned dismal at it. Some people can quickly determine a 15% tip on a dinner bill. I burst into tears and hope my waitress doesn't give herself a $50 when she takes my credit card.

Alt Focus: I always got A's in English and History, simply because my reading level was usually a couple of grades higher than the people in my class. Memorizing dates and locations was pretty easy for me too, which makes me slightly less nerdier than your average Jeopardy! contestant.

 

Focus: Physics. Physics I and II were rough semesters for me. I got a tutor, and, despite making B's in both courses, I never had more than a vague sense of what I was doing. It's a little ironic because my brother has a degree in Physics from a really good school. I inherited none of the Physics Genes, and he was no help. "What? You need help with THAT? That's so far below me that I don't even remember how to do that." Thanks, ass. Way to kick me when I'm down.

Anti-Focus: Pretty much all other sciences and some math. I loved my A&Ps, chems, bios, biochem, micro, and statistics. When it comes to learning a process or concept, I really connect to it and it's easy for me to remember. I never noticed it until a few years ago we were learning cellular respiration in general biology. After the lecture and going over the notes once I went over the steps for a group in my class before the next lecture. For some reason it was really easy for me to remember the order of steps and what is produced during each step. Same goes for anatomy and physiology. I got A's in those courses because it's all about function/structure and about a dozen mini-steps in a process. When you break it down and really see what's happening at each phase it makes so much sense that it almost feels intuitive.

 

Phys Ed.

 

For me it wasn't really any one general subject that gave me trouble (Math, Science, Social Studies, English), it was the level that I was taking it at.

Focus
Calculus: I didn't have any problem with Trigonometry, Precalculus, or Algebra, but holy shit was Calculus a whole new ball game. Like at least one other person here said happened to them, I failed it but my professor passed me with a D. I went to class every day and had gone to his office hours and told him that I had someone tutoring me in it (which I did), so I guess he thought that I earned my D. My teacher was a nice guy but didn't explain the material very well, but even if he had been, I don't think that I could have gotten better than a C in the class unless I studied and did practice problems for at least three hours every night. The weird thing is that I took Precaluclus at FSU and then took Calculus when I transferred to UGA, and everyone said that if you took Precalculus and Calculus at UGA, Precalclus is really hard and Calculus is a breeze. I just don't see how that's possible.

Geometry, or more specifically, proofs. I took Geometry my sophomore year of high school, and I was in danger of failing first semester when we were doing proofs. I don't think that I did a single proof completely right in the entire semester. I tried so hard but could not understand them for the life of me. Most people in my class either thought that they were the easiest things they had done in any math class or were like me and didn't grasp them at all. Outside of proofs Geometry was easy for me, but that one concept alone almost ruined it.

Upper-Level Latin I took Spanish III my sophomore year of high school, and then switched to Latin my junior year, like a lot of kids in my class did. I did really well in the class, had a cool teacher, and joined Latin Club and went to the annual convention. I did basically the same thing in Latin II in my senior year. At FSU I didn't have to take any foreign languages, but then at UGA I did, so my junior year I took the first two semesters of Latin, which were introductory courses that basically repeated what I learned in high school. I got a high A in the first semester class. The professor I had for the second semester wasn't very good, but I still managed a B with minimal studying. The third and final semester, where we started translating real Latin, was a nightmare. For the first half of the semester we translated an account that Julius Caesar wrote of his invasion of Britain, and in the second half of the semester we translated part of Ovid's Metamorphoses. I learned pretty quickly that there is a huge difference between translating Latin sentences that your teacher made up, and translating Latin as it was actually spoken. The students who were getting Bs and Cs in the first two semesters where I was getting As and Bs were still able to make their Bs and Cs, but I got a D in the class, and in all likelihood my numeric grade was probably in the 40s. The biggest problem for me was that the Caesar and Ovid books had a lot of vocabulary words that I had never seen before, and I didn't want to spend another semester memorizing even more vocabulary. But even if I had a word bank to use on the tests, my grades probably wouldn't have been much better.

Introductory Level Biology in College. Biology wasn't my favorite class that I took in high school, but I got a B in it and was pretty indifferent about the class, even with probably the worst teacher I have ever had for any class. But when I took BIO 1103 at UGA, I got a D in the class. It was a huge, auditorium-sized class where most everybody did well, but I was lost. My teacher was a cool lady but didn't explain the material very well in lectures. I am hesitant to blame her, though, because I read the book and still couldn't get higher than Ds on the quizzes and tests.

I will second Art and Computer Programming. The only class that I have ever failed was 7th grade Art, where I got a 57. I could never even finish most projects because I kept doing them wrong and had to give up. I also had to drop an introductory level computer programming class that I signed up for at UGA, because I had no idea what was going on after 4 weeks in the class.