If I didn't have much need for Geometry my sophomore year, or Algebra II II my junior year, I sure the heck did not need Math Analysis my senior year. I was really good at Math, but I didn't really enjoy it. I had reached my threshold for tolerance of the subject after 11 straight years. (At least I got a two-year break from Science in the eighth and ninth grades.)
Just like my second period class, I had no idea what the function of Math Analysis was. I guess it was supposed to be a preamble to Calculus, but our school didn't offer that course when I was a student there. I had the same teacher I had for the 10th grade Geometry class.
I started my path to being an unethical student in this class. This was because the teacher did not grade our homework. We were supposed to hand our homework to a nearby student and they would grade it while he read the answers aloud in class. After awhile, it got to the point that no one wanted to grade my homework, so I started grading it myself. A little while after that, I stopped marking my answers wrong. A little while after that, I just stopped doing the homework and would announce grades in the 90s.
I had a good reputation as an honest student. It was easy for me to get away with that. However, the problem came on the tests. Because I wasn't doing the homework, I had difficulties scoring anything above a C on the tests.
Ever since the sixth grade, the teachers would issue "Unsatisfactory Reports" to parents when their children weren't doing well in their classes. These were typically referred to as "Failing Slips" by the students. The nickname was a misnomer as they didn't always indicate that you were failing, just that you were doing unsatisfactory work. For the only time in my life, I got a "Failing Slip." The teacher is supposed to give it to the student, who then takes it to his parents to sign and bring it back. My Math Analysis teacher gave the slip directly to my mother. It said I was doing well on the homework, but not on the tests. Mom had a little discussion with me about that. I just said I would try harder.
I really didn't know what I was going to do. I had already cruised through most of the year without really learning anything. And then something unexpected and unusual happened. The teacher started instructing us on the concept of "Interpolation." This was some long, drawn-out process linked to sines, cosines, tangents, cotangents, secants and cosecants which I really didn't understand. But I did understand that the routine we had to go through to find the answers was extremely inefficient, because it involved us constantly having to look at the tables in the book for those designations. Every problem took at least five minutes to do. When he was showing us how to do it, I realized how much quicker it would be to do it on our scientific calculators. I went home that night and actually did my homework. I was able to do it in mere minutes.
When I came back to class the next day, everybody was complaining about how long the problems took. Someone said, "I wish there was a way to do this on our calculators!" I said, "There is!" During the time we were given in class to work on problems, I attempted to show some of the students how to work interpolation on their calculators. Not one of the students could grasp how to do it, even if I wrote down the specific instructions. This was even true of the students who had a higher class rank than me, even the "valedictorian."
The teacher was aware I was showing everyone the calculator shortcut. However, he wasn't aware that no one "got" how to do it, so he made the test really tough. I got through the test in a half hour and was permitted to leave class early to go to lunch. The rest of the class actually stayed through the first 20 minutes of lunch to complete their tests. I got a 95 percent on that test. It was enough to keep the teacher from giving my Mom any more "Unsatisfactory Reports" the rest of the year.
To tell the truth, there were some unexpected benefits that arose from taking all those Math classes. During the school year, in preparation for going to college, I took the American College Test. (I did not take the SAT.) I scored very well on the Math section. In fact, I did so well that I got automatic credit for my Math requirements when I attended Eastern New Mexico University. This meant that after high school, I never had to take another Math class for the rest of my life.
The current version of me thanks my past self for that.
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