Done with Algebra
I had my exam in Algebra yesterday, and it went fairly well. I could answer most of the questions, except the most difficult ones. I solved most of the questions in two and a half hour, but then got stuck in the last three subquestions. I just sat and starred at them for the remaining one and a half hour, but it didn’t help… It was quite annoying, and even more so when the exam finished, and I talked with Thomas Mølhave, Mikkel Krøigård and others from my class who had solved them :-/ As it is almost always the case with algebra, the solutions were fairly simple once you’ve seen them — they would fit into only a couple of lines for each subquestion.
So, I don’t really know what to expect of this exam, I guess my grade will be around 10 or perhaps 9 which is a very good grade, but still I feel that I should have been able to answer the last few questions too. The reason this bothers me is, that I can follow the arguments when someone presents them to me, but I’m having difficulities making the arguments myself. It’s not that I don’t understand the math or that I dislike working with this kind of math, it just that I don’t have the necessary routine to recognize the solution to the questions.
And now we’re getting close to the core of the problem: I don’t have the necessary routine because I haven’t spend enough time this semester solving the weekly algebra problems gives to us by our lecturer. All the way through school and high school (the Danish gymnasium) I’ve been able to get really good grades without having to work real hard, so I’ve continued that line at University of Aarhus, believing that I would somehow automatically do good… It’s a real shame if this doesn’t hold true :-)
But there’s nothing to do about all this now, I’ll have to look forward to the next exam, which will be in DAIMI:dPaSS.
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