Math 1016

It is finished.

I am done with math.

Forever.

Today I took my last math class for the rest of my life (hopefully). Math 1016 Calculus is an course required for liberal arts majors at Virginia Tech. It is taught in the emporium, which I will describe soon. I hated every minute of it. After a brief description of the emporium, I will describe some of the things math has taught me, that I will never use.

The Virginia Tech Math Emporium is a dimly-lit former warehouse in the University Mall. Located off campus, parking is always a hassle at the emporium, what with there being thousands of students enrolled in the same classes, all with deadlines on the same day. You can usually expect a line to get into the math emporium (over an hour was the longest I have waited) and once you get in you are greeted by two girls drinking slurpees and playing computer solitaire who snatch your Hokie ID, scan it, and grumpily ask if you need a computer. These employees always act as if I am ruining their day by checking in, when in reality I'm consigning myself to hours of torture and their getting paid $8.50 an hour to sit in a comfy chair and move their arm up and down once a minute. Once you get pass these wenches, you move onto your assigned computer, usually next to an extremely tan girl talking very loudly on her phone, or an engineer snoring and his pod next to you. You log in and then slowly read the poorly worded explanations of problems, and look at the examples which are nothing like the actual quizzes. You have the option of putting up a red solo cup to request help, but that process can mean a thirty minute wait in between answers. The employee/student ratio is roughly 1/1,000. You are not allowed to have food or drink in the emporium.

This is where I have been enrolled in my math class. Calculus. I'm not bad at calculus to be honest, and I took pretty much this exact course my junior year of high school. But when I know that I'm going to have to go to the emporium to do work, something inside me dies a little every time. Especially because of the negative mindset I have about calculus in general. It is completely pointless for me to know. Am I an engineer? no. Am I an architect? no. Am I a history major? yes. Here are some examples of what I worked on this semester.

Deriving Functions- As a history major it is imperative that I know how to figure out at what point a tangent line touches a parabola.

Rate of Change- Everyone knows snowmen melt. But why not have the ability to figure out how fast the snowman is melting?! Well an imaginary snowman, unless you want to get a ruler and go out in the snow to discover the original size.

Derivative Graphs- If knowing the how to figure out what point the lines were touching at wasn't enough, it is now time to be able to graph said lines.

That's it pretty much. The entire course was more and more advanced derivatives with tons of signs that I don't care about (ln, e, sine, cosine, secant, cosecant, tangent,cotangent, log, a^x etc...). In other words stuff I am never going to use.

So here's to you pointless mathematics course, I will never use any of the methods I learned. But thank you for the patience I built while waiting in that line.

Sorry for the extreme cynicism throughout this article. Now it is time for me to study much more relevant things, like Alexander the Great.