Algebra

I just finished taking an intense 5 week coarse of Algebra, no big deal, but to me; a big deal. I have always liked math, even as a kid but understanding the concepts have not been easy for me. I eventually would understand but at a much slower speed then most of my peers putting me in the D to failure, category. It was difficult for me to ask for help since I found it very humilitating that I did not "get it", when most seem to with out any difficulty. Either way I made it through life with minimal understanding of numbers and their meaning and importance in life, I mean, I have ten toes and ten fingers and they seem to come through quite nice; in a pinch. When I went to nursing school, yes I am a nurse and yes math is an important detail in my type of chosen profession, but somehow visualizing formulas and using cheat-sheets got me through that. I did have to take an algebra coarse to get into nursing school but I barely eked through it and thought that was the end of that torturous class. I then decided to pursue a higher education and found that I needed to take more math, this was something that I found so painful because I just knew that it was going to quelch my dreams; however it did not stop me. I failed the coarse twice and dropped it twice, each time panicking when I saw letters and numbers in the same problem, and lets not even talk about the dreaded "word problems". Since taking and passing this last Algebra class, I was astounded how, life is just one big fat word problem, and even more astounding to me, was to find that most of us muddle through this, big fat word problem called life, without even knowing it. I seriously want to know who came up with the, quadratic formula? I mean, it is obvious to me that whom ever came up with all these formulas, was obviously some type of abnormal prto-type. It is not a nomral thing for most people to sit and come up with formulas mixing letters and numbers to fiugure out how far or how fast or how high something goes. I can appreciate, being one with a higher education, the ability to have a formula to find out these curious things, but why, I ask, why must I have to know this to graduate? I know that I will never feel the need to know how far the red ball goes when you throw it nor do I care to know at what point the blue ball and the red ball meet when you throw then at the same time, I just don't care. I normally throw one ball at a time, anyway and all I want from this activity is for the dog to go get it before it lands in the ocean and gets lost. I know there is probably several geniuses out there laughing at my simplicity and thinking, how sad for this woman to not understand the importance of those two colored balls having a point where they meet, how does she get through life?, ha! Well I did pass, finally. The word problems were a challange but my daughter happens to be one of these geniuses that cares when these balls meet, and better yet she knows how to figure out how and when they meet once you through them, so I picked her brain and with her help I managed to fuddle through. I got a B plus in the intense and condensed coarse, that came as a big surprise to me but I passed, so that is all that really matters. It is important for all to know that I do not get math, I actually like it very much because I like to have answers, that is until I met with the imaginary numbers; but that is another story.