Time for a poll

[chickenfeet]

I needed an excuse to use the user pic voted most popular by a random sample of sentient beings. I've also had some interesting on and off line convos and comments about math(s) recently so I thought what we really need is more ticky boxes. Lo, I bring you the great math(s) poll!

[Poll #826509]

Comments

[thidwick.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what the US equivalent of an O-level in maths would be, so my checkbox there may be incorrect. I [barely] made it through trigonometry pre-calculus before I quit.

I was always quite interested in math, but it didn't come very easily to me, especially as we got farther and farther into more abstract concepts. And then I had an absolutely terrible math teacher for two years in high school. He was nearing retirement and had clearly lost interest in teaching. Rather than learning how to do math, we learned how to use our graphing calculators. I fell apart in his class. I really needed the sort of math teacher who would explain things out, step by step, in a way that a lot of my more mathematically-inclined peers probably would have found boring or slow or redundant. Switching teachers wasn't a possibility -- he was the only teacher who taught the levels of math I was in at the time (Algebra II, and then functions/statistics/trigonometry/pre-calc). I would have taken calculus my senior year (with a teacher who was widely regarded as wonderful), but at that point any interest in the subject had been beaten out of me, plus I really did not feel like I was prepared. I had passed my last year of math by the skin of my teeth -- and even that was due more to my comfort with my calculator. I certainly didn't actually understand much of anything!

Even if I'd had the Best Math Teacher Ever in high school, I still doubt I would have gone into a field that was math-heavy, and because my interests were elsewhere I probably wouldn't have pursued it any farther than I absolutely needed to. But still, I really regret that I didn't have that choice.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what the US equivalent of an O-level in maths would be

There isn't one really I guess. That part of the question was aimed more at people in countries that have national exams at 16 and 18.