My First Math Theory

My uncle is an engineer. Some time ago, I remember him telling me about university, that they were so overloaded with work that by the end of it, he truly believed that university was just an exercise on time mamagement; calculating which assignments you could take a zero on, get some sleep, and still come out with a good mark.

I’ve decided that’s what I’m going to do for math.

My teacher is pretty good at getting me to understand what’s going on with the values of a, p, x, and q. She finishes writing the notes on the board and then assigns, literally, two to three hours of homework. (It takes that long if you show all your work to get perfect homework completion marks.)

My teacher takes in and marks for completion about two homework assignments per unit. The problem is, she doesn’t tell you which ones she’s going to ask for, which, I’m assuming, is her way of motivating us to do all the homework every night just to be safe.

The outline she gave us in the beginning of February shows there are eight units, worth between five and ten percent each, the midterm worth ten and the final worth thirty. At the bottom it says that unit tests carry the majority of the weight for each unit.

I did nearly all of the homework for linear systems, the first unit, and came out with eighty two percent on the unit test. The last time I checked my cumulative mark it was at an eighty four. In this unit, quadratic functions, I’ve not done a quarter of the homework and got ninety four percent on the latest quiz. I don’t expect my unit test mark to be that high, though.

I share my classmates’ adamant opinion that I’m not so stupid that it takes me fifty of the same question to get the picture.

So, here is my theory: I will do as many homework questions as it takes for me to understand what I’m doing, and then I’ll stop. Then I will do well on the unit final. I will get very, very low marks on the homework completion checks, but as a result of the weighting, I’ll still come out with a mark above eighty.

I plan on applying this theory starting Monday. The results will come in when I get my first report card on March eighteenth. If my mark is over eighty, I will carry on. If it isn’t, the theory goes to the dogs and I start doing all my homework again.

I have no doubt that my overall mark really would be higher if I did every question of my homework, but I am not willing to sacrifice two hours of every day to do math work. I am, however, willing to take an eighty over an eighty five and bask in the saved time.