I got a B in Pre-Calculus at a community college in California. For some reason, I lived with this archaic philosophy that its appropriate and reasonable to learn the material in a linear fashion with the pace of the course. That is to say, I would remain a mathematical virgln with regards to a certain section right up until I have homework or am to be tested on such a section. At that point, I’ll study and do some practice problems. Although I’d routinely miscalculate how many hours the homework would take so for a handful of the latter half of assignments, I just guessed/looked at the back of book to rapidly scribble the answers down leaving significant gaps in my understanding. How this was a version of me just a couple months ago is astonishing. I’m taking calculus right now and I basically memorized half the book, spent hours practicing problems, and mastered limits, derivatives, chain rule, product rule, antiderivatives, closed interval method, concave upward/downward, both parts of the fundamental theorem of calculus and the u method before day 1. I’m gonna do a section of Calc II material every day and I don’t start that class until August 20th. Calc III is in the spring. Already got down over 30 pages of notes for three-dimensional planes, vector spaces, and partial derivatives.
Iv’e surrendered my soul to math, gone through my ‘Jesus’ moment so to speak after getting a B in Pre-Calculus and feel Iv’e nailed the solutions for making sure I never get a grade less than the one that rightfully represents my maximum cognitive aptitude in that given subject. I know once I reach statistical mechanics and supersymmetry and bose-einstein stuff, I very well might be so genetically limited, I would be unable to get an A no matter how many hours and months I spent trying. My acceptance of this reinforces my newly refined outlook that I might as well get A’s in everything I feasibly can. Everyone has a pinnacle of understanding. Who knows how far away mine is. But I might as well dominate the classes with material thats in my grasp while I’m in such a scholastic space. My dad [who scored basically the same on an IQ test as I (134-135, although I was sleep deprived and his memory and mental math is nowhere near mine. FYI this was at an actual place. I had to do to testing for legal reasons last year)] said he spent years trying to understand the Theory of Everything and couldn’t.
The material at the end of Pre-Calculus that lowered my grade was easy. It was multiplying vectors by scalars(in the most elementary abstraction-free algebraic ways), complex root number z, conjugate of z, demoivre’s theorem, finding symmetry of curves and functions on a polar plane type stuff. I never looked at this stuff and my mind was not focused. I got arrested early April and after leaving jail (only in custody a few hours), I had a hard time getting my mind on the unit circle, but got an A- on the first post-jail quiz pretty easily. Problem in first place was I got recognized in public from fake news newspaper coverage and as I was fighting 6-8 security guards, I got a bloody nose and a crowd of bar patrons were cheering on the oppressors as I’m handcuffed, asphyxiated and subdued. Lets just say I was not happy about leaving jail at 3am and upon returning to the scene, noticing that everyone who clapped and cheered had dispersed. And apparently, private spapchat messages that get deleted automatically and aren’t screenshoted aren’t so private or secure. So a few weeks go by and The FBI puts me on a 51/50 ‘danger to self or others’ 72 hour hold on a Wednesday in April a month before finals. I missed lecture, a PreCalc quiz and a Chem exam and had to catch up when I was already super busy. Also, the DA was trying to raise my bail to $500,000 for unrelated online venting about police and last year’s subsidized batterers and my private attorney told me I’d have to get into a program to get my 20+ criminal charges from last year dropped. I spent two weeks not caring about school and instead figuring out how I can escape to Europe and be a fugitive. I got assaulted and pepper sprayed last year at a different school district and still have restraining orders (civil and criminal) barring me from those schools. You can google ‘Robert McDougal’ but the articles about me are all lies. I never disrupted a class or anything like that. Security followed me around when I was making no such disturbances that the news machine explicits. Everyone else had a calculator. I could have been a little more mature over my private emails. But whatever. Starting from scratch.
Since Pre-Calculus ended. Iv’e been able to successfully do every practice problem on every section that I was previously unfamiliar with, so I got it down. I couldn’t retake it at my school because I passed the class. Undeterred, I enrolled in an online (but with proctored/in-person exams) Pre-Calculus class at a UC school. Will the new grade replace my old one on a GPA scale? I’ll send both transcripts when I apply. I just want it to be apparent that I got an A in Pre-Calculus.
Furthermore, what sort of conclusions will college board members at whatever respective colleges I apply to make beyond understanding that I’m neurologically capable of mastering all of Pre-Calculus?