Star Ni
It was the first day of the Berkeley 2014 AwesomeMath Program. I had never struggled in school and knew I could ace every course I took, no matter how difficult. Here, my ego was soon toppled. Never before had any math left me bewildered. Aghast at the problems, I looked around at some of the greatest up and coming mathematical minds in the world breezing through them and realized perhaps, that I was not so great as I thought. AwesomeMath continued to be a struggle for the entire three weeks, but I now understand that my time there taught me lessons more valuable than the math. To put it mildly, the camp was hard. In this Algebra, I confronted concepts and problems that I had never seen before and could barely see even while looking at them. Prove that 345+ 456 is the product of two integers, each of them greater than 256-1. This question appearing in the second test of the course left me completely dumbfounded. Even today, I am not quite sure how to approach it, even though I have solved it before. Of course, it would have been simple to approach a …show more content…
I had grown tired of being clueless during lectures, always trailing behind as the teacher leaped from concept to concept. Despite toiling through the camp, spending late nights and devoting myself to hard study sessions, I was forced to watch as my peers surpassed me in every subject and on every test. The tipping point came when my roommates, whom I had known for years, were discussing problems from an even higher-level class. I again had the painful feeling that I was being left behind. If I could not even grasp the concepts of the easier class, how would I ever compete in more rigorous courses? But even with their detailed explanations, I struggled to grasp concepts that came naturally to them. Under their guidance, however, I did improve and by the end of the camp had mastered enough to pass the
It was the first day of the Berkeley 2014 AwesomeMath Program. I had never struggled in school and knew I could ace every course I took, no matter how difficult. Here, my ego was soon toppled. Never before had any math left me bewildered. Aghast at the problems, I looked around at some of the greatest up and coming mathematical minds in the world breezing through them and realized perhaps, that I was not so great as I thought. AwesomeMath continued to be a struggle for the entire three weeks, but I now understand that my time there taught me lessons more valuable than the math. To put it mildly, the camp was hard. In this Algebra, I confronted concepts and problems that I had never seen before and could barely see even while looking at them. Prove that 345+ 456 is the product of two integers, each of them greater than 256-1. This question appearing in the second test of the course left me completely dumbfounded. Even today, I am not quite sure how to approach it, even though I have solved it before. Of course, it would have been simple to approach a …show more content…
I had grown tired of being clueless during lectures, always trailing behind as the teacher leaped from concept to concept. Despite toiling through the camp, spending late nights and devoting myself to hard study sessions, I was forced to watch as my peers surpassed me in every subject and on every test. The tipping point came when my roommates, whom I had known for years, were discussing problems from an even higher-level class. I again had the painful feeling that I was being left behind. If I could not even grasp the concepts of the easier class, how would I ever compete in more rigorous courses? But even with their detailed explanations, I struggled to grasp concepts that came naturally to them. Under their guidance, however, I did improve and by the end of the camp had mastered enough to pass the