Aggravated

This morning I went to my math class. Remember... my remedial math class? I'm taking this class so I can take other classes so I can get a promotion? Or something like that? I go every Thursday morning for three hours, and those are the longest three hours since time began. Usually our class consists of some review, a quiz, reading (together! I hate to fucking read together) this non-math book that contains tips and encouragement for us to be better students.

Today I got pissed off. Today I got pissed off, and we didn't even touch that horrible, secondary, non-math book.

So most of the stuff we're studying, I guess we also learned in the 7th grade. And I almost remember learning it in the 7th grade. Last week was fractions and decimals (well, one week was fractions and the next was decimals, but because I was in El Paso, it was all done in one week. Oh, okay, it was all done in one night: yes, I did two weeks' worth of work in about 2 hours, with American Idol providing the background), and this week, ratios and percentages.

Now, the way our actual math book is set up, is, it's a story book. Yes, you read that correctly. As possibly the youngest person in my class at 36 (hey, I had a birthday! Happy birthday to me!), I do not want to be learning math via a story about Sondra and Jackson and a big black cat named Beauregard, and them making lemonade, and I can only imagine how some of the older people in that class feel. For me, it's a dumb way to teach anything, to children or adults. Teach me the basics first and then if you feel so inclined, show me how it works in a story afterward. For now, I don't want to be learning, anything, this way. I just don't. In fact, fuck that. Fuck that, I say!

And now you see that I am pissed, but perhaps I haven't really explained why, or if I have, I haven't done a very good job of it. I am pissed because I know I know how to do this shit. I know I know how to figure out what 65% of 300 is. I know I do. In fact, I can almost remember Mr. Nakayama teaching this to me a hundred years ago. I can see Rachel sitting in front of me, and some guy named Carey sitting to my left... and I almost remember it. Yeah, so what if I was also writing "Irene [heart] Eric Taylor" on my peechee notebook. What's your point? And so why is it totally escaping me today? Why am I struggling with this? Because Mr. Nakayama demonstrated how to do it on the board and then had worksheets with problem after problem on it, and you did the same type of problem for awhile before you moved on to the next ones, and because as boring as it sounds, REPETITIOUS PRACTICE actually works.

Instead, we jumped from thing to thing in an ice cold room (and why do I get so tired in cold rooms? What's up with that?) and the teacher was a space case today and my seatmate kept asking me the answers and I just got pissed.

And then I missed my freeway exit on the way home and took wrong turn after wrong turn, and it took me 45 minutes instead of 30 to get home.

Fortunately now I am going to eat some lunch with my three cats in a warm house and the television before I have to get my ass back to work, where, well, talk about aggravated. Let's not even start.