The Last Minute Thoughts of a Scatter-brained Test Taker: AP Calculus Jitters

So here I am.

I’m scribbling across blank index cards with furious jerks and muttering formulas and choice swear words under my breath. My left hand aches from the effort and my right just desperately clings to my desk to prevent my falling under. I hadn’t showered in the past three days. Hello, week old sweatpants and leggings. Goodbye dresses and clean lacy frocks.

What’s happening to me you ask?

AP Testing.

Now, it’s not my first rodeo. In fact, I’ve taken three AP tests in the past two years: AP European during my sophomore year and AP US History and AP Language and Composition in my junior. Those were fair game, since my skills happen to lie in Humanities. This year however, I’ve found myself in quite the gooiest of student traps: Studying for three AP tests, one of them including AP Calculus.

Now if you know me, you’ll understand completely. In fact, you’ve probably seen me lugging around my four AP prep books for Calculus in the hall. Do I use all of them? Unfortunately, yes.

AND I STILL DON’T GET IT.

Math is definitely not my forte. It never was. Just when I think I get it, suddenly what I knew, my world, comes tumbling down like my audition pieces for Sweeney Todd. (Let’s just say, it was bad.) I get that derivatives are slopes and rates and integrals calculate the area under the curve. But what the hell do we need it for? When am I ever going to use it in life? In fact, I question and struggle with this so much that I’ve put in extra time after and before school, trying to get help from whoever I could find: Ms. Balaich, the Veillons, my many, many math tutors, even my fellow peers who are just as lost as I am. I mean, someone has to get it right? If no one understood, why are educators bothering to teach it? Am I just that stupid? Am I that hopeless of a student?

Some points, I debated whether or not to cease the AP Calc studying forever and just focus on my stronger suits. But the hopes of not taking Math in college always brought me back to burying my head into the prep book’s pages and jabbing myself in the cranium with pens. Sometimes, I wish I wasn’t so freaking ambitious. (DaVinci’s 2015 Valedictorian being ambitious? Cray, I know.) But there’s something about pushing yourself beyond your limits that becomes quite addictive. Maybe I enjoy the pain. Or maybe, I enjoy the satisfaction of surviving something so horrible. (But don’t expect me to go without complaining away.)

Whatever it is. I’m going to keep trying. Whatever happens tomorrow morning, May 5, 2015, at 8 AM, I’m going to survive it. I’ll come out a tad bit more brain-damaged than before, but I will come out and breathe in the sweet, sweet Ogden air, only to start the vicious cycle again.

AP Literature is next.

Stay tuned.