The Wall

For a while, I have been able to see it from a distance. Every day I would check to see if I saw it moving closer, knowing that if it did, I would be in trouble. When I returned this week from vacation I was not surprised to see it right in front of me. I am talking about the wall. That seemingly insurmountable force that wants me to stop my quest to learn calculus by making it look daunting, foolish and, worst yet, insignificant.

 

I was expecting to have lingering doubts about how consequential my desire to learn calculus is. I knew a day would come when I would ask myself: "What am I doing? This is ridiculous. I am just going to waste my time with this." The posts on words of encouragement were a weekly reminder against this.

 

What I was not expecting was the attack on my intellectual ability to actually do this. When the wall appeared this week, it had an inscription that says: "You cannot understand any of this anymore. It will just get worse, I promise." It's hard to argue with the inscription when it rings so true. The last two weeks I have been struggling to truly grasp the concepts I have been reviewing. They are mainly pre-calculus properties and transformations. I have a hard time using radians and relating them to trig graphs and the unit circle.

 

Part of me knows that the reason i am struggling is that I have not done THE WORK. I have not consciously gone throughout the process of memorizing all the trigonometric properties and, more importantly, the values of sin, cos and tan for special angles in the unit circle. Still, a small but potent voice, tells me that I am just rationalizing the real problem: you are incapable of learning this. And for this week I have been to much of coward to find out which voice was right.

 

Until today.

 

Today I will begin THE WORK. I will set out to store in my long term memory all the trigonometric properties I can. I see cue cards and pop quizzes in my future. I am confident that the work I put in these days will be invaluable when I start with Calculus.

 

Wish me luck. I have a wall to turn down. Now, where is my sledgehammer?