Early
in life I was an avid student, I wanted to learn everything I could and
I absolutely loved finding out new things and it showed in my school
work. I was placed in the Talented and Gifted program early in
elementary school and this got me put into things like the higher math
classes and fun extra-curricular activities. I even had all A-plusses my
seventh grade year, though much of that was just lenient teachers
assigning entirely too much extra credit, other than my one A in math.
Unfortunately this all changed for me in high-school.
By
freshman year I was still in advanced placement math but I had elected
to stay in general studies for most of my class because those were the
ones that most of my friends would be taking. I was much more interested
in having classes with my friends and hanging out between classes than I
was in trying to further my academic career or thinking ahead to
college and the real world. I did alright in most of my classes pulling
down solid C’s and the occasional A in the classes I really cared for.
However the class I should have paid the most attention to, my Algebra
1/Geometry class, that advanced placement math class, I wound up failing
spectacularly. If my memory serves me correctly I wound up with a 37%
in that particular class, the worst grade I had ever received.
My
miserable failure in that class was in part due to the third or fourth
unit covering triangles and how to find missing parts. For example, if
you have lengths A and B, find the length of C on this right triangle.
The required functions that I still vividly remember not being able to
wrap my head around were the dreaded sine, cosine and tangents. Those
buttons on my calculator that I could not fathom what job in the real
world would ever require me to push them. Needless to say not being able
to grasp these key concepts got me far enough behind in class that I
wound up throwing in the towel. First period math was now the place
where I caught up on sleep.
That
summer my dad made me take a summer course to make up for that failed
class, I passed it but only just. My sophomore year I stepped out of
advanced placement and went back into math for my grade level but again I
did poorly, after my one plain A back in seventh grade and the failure
from the previous year I had written off math. Once again I wound up in
summer school to make up for the botched class, again passing without
incident but without much flair. Thankfully though, by this point I had
reached the minimum level of math as required by the state and I no
longer needed to take any more math courses. I flew through the rest of
highschool pulling down decent grades knowing I wouldn’t need to deal
with math again until college, thinking that I would again try to get
away with as little of that cursed subject as possible.
Looking
back on my time in high school I am more than a little annoyed with
myself. I skated by passing most of my classes while putting in the
least effort possible. I would deliberately take easier courses that I
knew I could pass without having to apply myself too hard. Not to knock
this completely, some of those courses helped me with things like a
complete fear of public speaking or classes that forced me to read
things outside of my normal wheel-house. On the other hand it really was
not necessary for me to take another class playing with lego’s or most
of the art classes I took just because I knew that the teachers were
easy graders. I was being lazy and I was trying to ignore it. What drove
this fact home for me though was that my family moved in the middle of
my senior year.
This
particular gem fell into place during the summer between my Junior and
Senior year, but we were not well enough organized to have been moved
out before the start of classes. As a result, the first week of class I
went to the councilor and found out what it would take for me to
graduate early. I had gone to school with most of these people since the
second grade and I felt that if I were to go to another high school for
my last two terms I would resent the whole ceremony and be angrier at
my parents for taking my senior year away from me. In my lazy way I had
managed to get most of the courses required of me by the state to
graduate except a couple of English classes. I had also taken an after
school class sophomore and junior year so I was well ahead in credits.
After some finagling we got me into the classes that I needed to
graduate and they agreed to let me walk in the graduation ceremony that
spring. Those classes that I took my abbreviated senior year I got all
A’s in. I had to admit to myself that I had screwed off most all of my
high school years.
After
school ended I went to work for my dad for a few years and eventually I
moved out with my girlfriend and my best-friend from high school. When I
moved out I knew that I needed to get a second job since the job for my
dad had low but odd hours. It just so happened that my now-roommate
wanted to quit his job and didn’t want to leave his employer in a lurch.
Instead he offered me his position of total-station operator for the
field crew of a small land-surveying firm. This was an amazing job as
far as I was concerned, it had me outside every day and not trying to
actively convince some random person that they really wanted to buy some
product from me. It was part treasure hunt, part daily hiking trip and
all fun.
One
day while I had a bit of down time between measurements I got the idea
into my head that I wanted to know how this magical instrument was able
to collect the information it gathered from the limited information that
was provided to it. Every time I took a shot it would collect a
distance measurement from me to my crew chief. It also took a horizontal
measurement from “0” and a vertical measure from “90”. After all my
spare time between shots was spent trying to work the problem backwards,
I had all the real answers since this thing knew how to solve the
problem, I eventually gave up.
By
happenstance a few weeks later I was going through the manual trying to
troubleshoot an unrelated issue, when I came across the page that
showed the magical math formula’s. These showed how my instrument could
place all of the measurements I had taken on an xyz graph with precision
down to the thousandths. There in the middle of the page was my old
nemesis; sine, cosine and tangent. The subject that I had wound up
loathing in high school, the exact unit that caused me to fail math
several times, that horrible equation created by sadists thousands of
years ago expressly to torture me in freshman math was at the center of
my newfound job that I loved. Without this particular function my job
could not have existed.
The
whole time I was taking those math classes I could not conceive of a
possible use for these functions and equations they were trying to beat
into my head. I thought that once I was out in the real world somehow
basic math skills would suffice and these more advanced functions served
no use to anything that I would ever do. It really just showed me that
no matter how trivial and useless a thing may seem at the time, you
never know when it may somehow wind up being the lynchpin to your life.
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