Math Month!

I'm declaring September 2012 "Math Month!"  

Sounds super exciting and fun; right? Almost like "the Summer of George." lol  Not so much!

I'm in a Statistics class right now for school... (the only math-related class in this undergrad program, thank God).  The teacher doesn't explain it in a way that makes much sense to me, so I'm hoping a thorough reading of the textbook and online videos will solve that problem.  I'm also studying for the GRE test, which I will be taking on September 22nd.  Before studying at all, I did a practice test today to see where I stand.  I  felt pretty confident about the Analytical Writing and had almost perfect scores on the Verbal Reasoning sections!  I was surprised how easy some of it was, and excited that I might not have to study as much as I thought.  Then came the Quantitative Reasoning sections... I had an hour to complete them, but it was quickly apparent that any amount of time would not have made a difference...  I was totally guessing on around half of them, and got less than half right in both sections.

I understand English -- it makes total sense to me, and I use grammar and reasoning and reading comprehension in everyday life.  But my mind seems to glaze over and go blank when I start reading about circumferences and pi and percentages and means and standard deviations and isosceles right triangles and radius and area and square roots and exponents and ratios and fractions and solving for x.... especially when I'm not allowed to use a calculator!  Uuuuuugh!

From the bottom of my heart, I find very little real-life use for this sort of math knowledge... and I find it hard to concentrate and get excited about studying and re-learning these things that have nothing to do with my future career path.  However, I want to do my very best on the GRE and I want an A in my Stats class, so for one month, I am devoting as much attention as I can muster to becoming awesome at math... wish me luck!!

...then I can forget it all again in October. ;-)