My Weak Strengths

By Jonathan Lam on 01/06/16

Tagged: the-homework-life the-homework-life-other

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Simply put, I had a suboptimal school day today.

In Wellness, we had a test on CPR, in which we hadn't covered many of the scenarios that were supposed to be "common sense." I've always had a problem with common sense.

Secondly, we had a test in Chemistry about the hardness of water, soap versus detergents, and the periodic table: its discovery, its structure, and some specifics about notable families. According to Dr. Nuzzo, it was the easiest test this quarter; however, considering her tests, it was still daunting.

The real horrors began with math, the most unlikely story. The problem is that I like math. I like to think of myself as "mathematically fluent." And I don't get many problems wrong. I'm not boasting — according to the image on the right, I'm right along with the top 1/3 of the world.

The test was coming along well until I began to check my work. I had done three polynomial division problems incorrectly, and I had almost forgotten the remainder theorem. With only ten minutes left, I set off correcting my mistakes. The last problem to correct was a simple factoring problem:

I had correctly found the zero of 1 and factored it:

And then, with the almighty quadratic formula, I found the values of x (the zeroes of the function).

And then, forgetting that we had to have integer coefficients for factoring, I naively put these two back in the function incorrectly.

When it should have been like so:

Then, in math team, a similar trend followed, and I had three questions that I missed by a small margin that cost me many points. I barely made A team today. Much of this may be attributed to a lack of studying, but there's finals and bowling and sleeping and school and worrying Nuzzo quizzes that I have to be concerned about. And on top of everything, I obtained a cankersore and two papercuts. What a day!

(Sorry for the poor math rendering or the boring-ness of the equations; I'll try to use better math rendering if I attempt to explain math in the future. And sorry that I'm complaining about life — however, this is the homework life)