Memoir Part II

In the last post I started a student memoir from a Rockhurst English class taught by Dr. Martin. Here is part two of the memoir (see March 11th post for beginning). Enjoy.

. . . My first impulse was to get the dreaded class out of the way. I knew I would hate it to the end, and the only chance I saw for getting a good grade was selling my soul to the devil. Such a Faustian outlook managed to convince the more rational part of myself that math was too torturous for my first semester, and so that fall of my freshman year was delightfully math-free. College had a strange effect on me. I found I relished the stress, the difficulty—the blur of papers and exams and procrastinated assignments. Having been homeschooled throughout grade school and high school, I had never really felt the pressure to achieve good grades. To do well, certainly, but not for a grade. As the weeks dragged by and I immersed myself in history, psychology, composition, and philosophy, my aspirations began a series of quantum leaps. When I was much younger, before I’d realized what I figured then to be the unfortunate union of math and science, I had wanted to be a doctor. Perhaps my sudden proximity to others who were actually pursuing this ambition reawakened this dormant notion. All at once it seemed possible. Even so, the two semesters of math required by most medical schools made me anxious.
“I want to be pre-med,” I confided to one of my professors. “But I’m afraid it’ll be too hard.”
He regarded me sympathetically, as if he’d glimpsed in my words the awful fear of failure that had so often paralyzed me in the past. “. . . the only thing I would be worried about is it being too easy.”
The words emboldened me. I was registered for Precalculus the next semester, and I decided I would get an A in that class. In the meantime I began a sort of mental conditioning program. Math couldn’t be as bad as I remembered. It was all perspective. I had learned to hate it, had learned to fear it, and if I could somehow teach myself to look at each equation and graph with a smile and an open mind, I could be good at math.
The early weeks of that first college math course passed in a blur. It was not bad, but not exactly good, either—I think I saw it as a distasteful, but bearable, undertaking. Then something changed. . .