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I Am Horrible At Math

Well, I'm prepared to fail this Calculus test. I just literally don't know anything about what we've been learning for the past month....
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ArishMell · 70-79, M
I can sympathise with that although I never took a Calculus test or examination as such.

My experience though shows it can be possible to break the mental wall around something like that, by the angle of approach....

I was [i]taught [/i]Calculus at school - [i]not [/i]as a curriculum subject alone as if it exists outside of Mathematics, but as with all Maths topics, with the standard Maths syllabus. Hence any formal calculus tests would have been within the normal Maths exam.

Nevertheless, I wrote [i]taught[/i] it. I did not [i]learn[/i] it! Not at school.

It was not until some 4 decades after I had left school that I finally twigged what is Differentiation. Not how to do it, but what it means; which would make learning how to do it much easier.

This epiphany came during a technical lecture connected with one of my hobbies, in a club setting, not a college. The lecturer showed us a simple formula and [i]something[/i] I know not what, made me write it in calculus notation...

Helped by this being about a real-world thing not a maths text-book abstraction, it suddenly dawned on me that the formula was a very basic [i]Differential[/i]!

I've not had that happen with Integration though.