John Holton is our host for Writer’s Workshop. Here are this week’s prompts:

  1.  Write a post based on the word oil.
  2.  Write a post in exactly 9 sentences.
  3.  Tell us about a toy that a sibling got (for his/her birthday, Christmas etc.) that you really wanted.
  4.  What was the most useless class you took? Tell us about it.
  5.  Which fictional character (from a book, comic book, TV show, or movie) did you most want to beat up? Why?
  6.  When did you learn that Santa Claus/the Easter Bunny/the Tooth Fairy was your parents? How did you figure it out?

Alright, I need the über math people to not kill me over this one but…calculus. The answer has to be calculus.

I’ve googled real world applications for calculus and I GET IT, this math does wonderful things in the world. I in particular benefit greatly from its use in navigational systems. If we could poll everyone from the office staff at my appointments to random commuters no longer forced to deal with my last minute panic at nearly missing my exit they would all praise calculus and its bountiful driving benefits.

And yet.

In my own existence, as far as things I find personally useful in my day to day life, as a creative brain with a few quirky personality traits — (peeks from behind my hands to see if this is still a safe space) — calculus was by far the most useless class I took.

Not only didn’t I actually gain let alone retain knowledge of the subject matter, I’d argue that class caused existential strife. I don’t know if everyone has one of these but that was my high school class where I wrestled with there’s absolutely no way I can pass this class without cheating, what do I do now?

So I have big feelings about abstract (to me) math and nothing will ever be funnier than a) me scoring higher on my math SATs than the reading/writing section and b) some tool in college suggesting I really ought to take calculus to meet my math requirement seeing as I’d already had it in high school and the SATs declared me a numbers-proficient brainiac.

Hilarious.

badge by Patty