Physics is my personal Goliath

Posted by E-George on October 9, 2007

For which I have no sling and no stone big enough to fell it.

Intimidation doesn’t often visit my doorstep, largely because it doesn’t like to be laughed at full in the face and derisively kicked to the curb. It only comes around when it knows it has the upper hand and can barge into the house like Cousin Eddie and demand lodging, food, and a place to commune with things unseen. Intimidation has an upper hand when it comes to my study of physics, so it moved in 8 weeks ago for a 16 week stay, only briefly leaving for a spa treatment elsewhere in between tests.

Physics has always been at the core of my educational insecurities. When I started Physics 160 (General Physics 1), I started with a relative degree of confidence. After all, I had successfully completed three semesters of calculus and an ordinary differential equations class. Surely Physics will make clarifying application of all the math I had soaked myself in up to that time. I soon learned that Physics certainly made application of all the math I had learned, but it was not, by any means, a clarifying application. Rather, it wrapped the math in a giant Dagwood of concepts, for which there are multitudinous routes for extracting solutions. This contradicted the math which I had finally grown a sycophant’s fondness for. In math, there is a problem that had one solution. Not one problem and fifteen potential solutions, all of which could be right but simultaneously could all be wrong. Immediately, physics struck me as a counterintuitive study. Deliberately complicated to weed out the incompetent and stupid. I blindly fumbled my way out of that class (and its insipid lab) with just a C.

Now, I’m attempting Physics 161 (General Physics II). Like many classes I’ve had before, it refers to previously learned concepts of kinetic energy, potential energy, potential, and the force of gravity acting on my earrings while I tear my hair out by the hand-writing-camped fistful. The first test was a disaster. It was 14 questions spread across 50 minutes, and only 9 of those questions I was able to answer. Of those 9, more than half I answered wrong. The grader simply wrote a number on my test, and I gathered from that value that they couldn’t assign a letter grade to a number so low. Extrapolating the letter-per-10-points grading system, I concluded I had earned an H on that first test. When I asked my professor about the salvagability of my grade, and revealed my grade on the first test, his eyebrows shot up well past his hair line and he gravely told me that I would have to get a B or better on every test henceforth for the semester. He followed that up with ensuring me that he’d never seen a student succeed after failing so thoroughly.

Que bummer.

Getting a B on a physics test is slightly less likely than my bumping into Josh Groban at the farmer’s market and him offering to sing at my church. But I paid $500 to UNM and the deadline to drop a class and get a refund had well past. All that was left to me was to try to pass the class. As Melville wrote, “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!” So, I flung myself into the next section and once again, physics changed, inverted, and otherwise molested the expectations of my learning. I spent my entire weekend preparing flash cards, studying, reading, reviewing, and unconsciously gritting my teeth so hard that come dinner time, I could barely masticate my meal. I hunched over my text book and notes and homework drilling in the concepts, the equations, and the ideas until the entire left hemisphere of my brain ached, and the right hemisphere thought it was a mallomar.

I took the second test yesterday and to my great pleasure I was able to fill the entire test out. The accuracy of my answers remains dubious, but I was hugely relieved to have been able to hand in a completed scantron. So, even if I fail this test, I feel like I have actually improved. And, by that modicum of improvement, I will be able to roust Intimidation’s stinky feet off the coffee table and make it load the dishwasher, taking away some of its foothold and regaining ground lost to fear.

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