[Eris]

You've heard of "Doomsday preppers", those funny little people who run around acting like it's still Y2K, building sophisticated underground bunkers, the chemical toilets, growing mobile and sustainable protein, vegetation, and even medical sources sources in tanks, stocking up on weapons, supplies & canned food, and teaching their family how to fight and survive like they're living some sort of "Mad Max" alternate reality, these people are truly nutty, right??....

Well maybe better safe than sorry isn't such a bad mentality, right? Say one perhaps is "overly conscientious" about one's oral hygiene, I bet that person has excellent reports from their dentist, and a beautiful smile. Although it is possible it could be possible too much fixation could lead to detriment of health, I've noticed it's much harder to get to that point when the subject of fixation is something that improves your health, mind or body. In fact if you're down right terrible at something, or you feel you want to improve upon something you never were able to before, while simultaneously avoiding another pain in your life, perhaps you should listen up to what I'm doing here.

As the topic may have suggested I am prepping for a college placement test at a local community college. When I found out about this placement test, I was so stressed, I SUCKED at math. I barely got by with a C in math in highschool cheating off the stoners. I found out that they have classes to help you "catch up", technically it's called remedial math, because it's lower than college math core classes. That's great right!? WRONG! Because it's below college level math level it doesn't count as core classes, and it doesn't count towards any program degree.

Bottom line, I would be wasting scholarships, grants, and my own money catching up on math alone if I didn't try to catch enough prior to the test to make it into an actual college level math course.

This meant I had to start studying my *** off. My parents were already getting antsy, because all I did was "talk about it" not realizing how much prep career planning, and meetings I was going to at the school. They are giving me a month, and it's due at the end of June to study for that test. And to be fair, I think a month is pretty long enough. Oh, and to make matters more challenging, I have dyscalculia, aspergers, (That meant for me, live tutoring was not an option, my brain is wired differently.) However,I had a plan...

First step, Was intel. I gathered all the info for the test I needed, like first what kinda calculators and material I could have for the test, and acquired them Then I found there were two parts to the math test. The first part, I need to score about an 86%, and the second I need to score like a 30% to get into the lowest level college math course.

Second step, I found study websites online. LOTS of them, lots of step by step math solving problem sites, lots of math and even ALEKS which has a fairly decent free trial.

Third step, I reviewed basic math VERY hard. You'd be surprised what you forget when you don't do it by hand. Also it helped get me back into the conceptualization for making sense with numbers, using multiplication facts again, common denominators, square rooting, just stuff you sort of don't use.

Forth step, I used the practice compass test from the ACT Compass site as a guide to study what I needed to know and learned it from the various sites I compiled.

Fifth step, While I was studying new concepts, and even old ones like fractions, I took various handwritten notes, labeled them neatly, explaining in words the mathematical function of everything I was doing specifically. For example if I was reviewing problems with percentages I'd label it Problems with Percents, identifying and calculating the Percent, Amount, and Base. Not for reff, but to cement it into my brain, honestly the only thing I looked back at that ever for was integers. Friggin integers.

Now... I'm feeling extra confident from when I first took the practice test. I blew through the first few questions. I think I might have a shot. We'll see.

[Talthybius]

Not sure if you have a question or not, but if you want an advanced education, math is such a nice and powerful tool.

Stuff like biology and physics really interest me. But only taking calculus, especially multivariate, I had these 'oh wow' moments where I marveled at how a complex problem was reduced so elegantly to something simple. Yes, it was still difficult. But learning it felt like a revelation. It had more aesthetic power than learning about cosmology or learning about biochemistry.

Math is so bittersweet and such a bane to so many people. And it spreads like a meme, it seems. People learn to fear math before they take it.

If a person truly believe math is unnecessarily difficult and pointless, you will not be successful in math. But so many people have this mindset. And of course then it become a negative feedback loop.