College is beating my ass

@BizSuitStacy I hated them at school!

When I was in my forties I took a standard school-level Maths course in college, in evening-classes, and its formal, national examination at the end, for work reasons. The exam was held in a local college.

Otherwise I have mainly bad memories of maths at school and certainly didn't enjoy it there.

I should explain the difference.

Until relatively recently when managing schools was given to commercial "trusts" who adopted pretentious names like "college" and "academy" for what are schools; in the British system a "college" was always an adult-education institution, either on its own or as part of a university. Schools were, and are, compulsory; college or university attendance voluntary or (for the college) as part of an apprenticeship.

Also, we don't learn Maths as a set of separate syllabus subjects, like, say, History and Geography would be; but as a set of topics within a single syllabus and curriculum. The examination ranges over the entire syllabus though may offer some choice of which questions to answer.

Why the bad memories?

Two reasons - my inability to understand large areas of the subject; and two frankly, bad teachers.

@ArishMell Sorry to hear. I guess I appreciated the lack of ambiguity in mathematics and heavily quantitative courses that are inherent in the humanities.

@BizSuitStacy Thank you! I have come to appreciate mathematics more in later life, partly through work, partly in my interests.

These between them gave me a better understanding of logarithms, Pi, trigonometry and calculus - though the last only to my finally realising what is Differentiation! It was a curious moment in a geology-club lecture that cracked that problem.

The one topic that eluded me totally was Matrices. These were new to me, in that adult-education course; and so abstract and disconnected from anything else I could not understand what they really are beyond boxes of simple sums. I was rather amused to find that among their 19C developers was Prof. Charles Dodgson - the real name in his normal work, of the fantasy-writer Lewis Carroll!