Rambling About Math

I should blog about General Conference talks. I should at least blog about something. I should also finish my math homework, even though it's really tedious and frustrating. I wish I had had the time to sweep today. I'll probably sweep tomorrow, after church and after I finish my math.

Apparently, my spell-checker doesn't know the word "math."

I did get some things done today, but not everything I planned to get done. Not everything I should have done. I think I'm going to stay up an finish my math homework. I really only have a few problems left to do. But each problem has multiple steps and computations to it. I'd figure out how many computations I have left to do, but that would require me to do more math. I don't want to do any more math right now.

But I have to.

And isn't that what life is? Doing things you don't want to do, doing things you "should" do. That's part of being an adult.

I like to understand things. When I know why I'm doing something, and I think it's a good reason, I'm a lot more willing to do it. For example, I know how to calculate the Standard Deviation of a set of data values, but I don't really know what a "Standard Deviation" is or why I should care about it. I don't know why I would ever want to calculate the Standard Deviation of a set of data values, so I'm not really excited about doing it. I know why I would want to calculate the probability of a certain result of a binomial probability test, so that was pretty interesting the first few dozen times I had to do it. But now, it's just tedious.

And it's frustrating to get wrong. So many times, I'd have to redo a computation (or two or three) because I found out that I hit a wrong button in one of my computations. I know how to do the math, I know I do. I just make mistakes. And one little mistake can mean redoing an awful lot of work. And even when I do everything right, the answers I get don't always perfectly match what's in the textbook because my textbook rounds the numbers differently than my calculator does, so I don't even get the satisfaction of watching all the numbers line up after all the work I did to come up with them. Usually, I can do even the most tedious work happily, as long as I have evidence that I'm doing it well, but now I don't even have that.

I don't think I like math.

No, I like math. I loved algebra. I even like some parts of statistics. It's really just this section of statistics that I don't like, and I only don't like it because I have to do it so many times.

There are patterns in the numbers of the math problems my professor asks us to do as homework. Sometimes, we're asked to do every third or fourth math problem. For this section, we're asked to do every other problem. And there are a lot of problems.

I have many problems. One of my problems is that I am a human and that I live in an imperfect world and that I don't like that. I usually don't dislike it as much as I do now. I usually don't have to do this much math.

That's all the rambling I have time for. Thanks for listening. Sometimes, I just need to get stuff off my chest, and this blog is good for that. But right now, what I need to do is more math.