I Hate Calculus

Calculus is a compulsory course of all the undergraduates except the students of school of international studies in Zhejiang University. In other words, if you only learn the easy mathematic in school of international studies, you are unable to take some secondary subjects. Since I’m in this situation, and for my long-term plan, I selcted calculus instead.

But my nightmare started from then on. The reasons why I hate calculus are complex. First and foremost, I have no interest in calculus. Tracing back to my childhood, I was never into math. And if an evaluation system can give me a score, I thought, It would always be “just so-so”. The only matter which prompted me to learn math well is the property of “Required Subjects”. Incidentally, my mother is an associated professor who teaches calculus in college, but still, I hate it. Secondly, learning calculus is a waste of time. Why would I say that? When I was attending the class, I can hardly get anything from my teacher. The speed of her class is so quick that I always feel puzzled. After class, It took me much time to go through the textbook. And that was far from the end. At the time of I’ve already know the main meaning of each part of the book, I start to deal with the assignment. When I saw the amount of questions, I’ve know that it’s quite a job. And what’s more, they had little connection with the examples on textbook. The exercise stressed the use of skills instead of the basic ability. Unexpectedly, I spent 3 hours in the homework at a time, but only 3 questions were solved. In total, 9 to 12 hours were taken away by calculus every week. As a result, I had no time to recite new words, to read books, to finish other subject’s paper… Uncountable things were laid aside in order to complete the endless homework. And I can barely acquire a good knowledge of math. The third reason is, most of the points you’ve learned from a textbook of calculus is useless. Unless you want to be a scientist to explorer the outer space or a mathematician to solve Goldbach’s conjecture. For example, only the mathematicians need to know how the Taylor Theorem was proved. It’s enough that other learners have known the usage of the theorem. That’s the main reason I hate calculus. I hope the education system will be more effective one day. At that time, the knowledge we learned from school will really be able to contribute to our future career.