Subject (5/5): Math Methods Units 3/4
Oh Maths Methods, the subject I love to hate. The subject that could completely make or break my week depending on the concepts we were learning. The fact that I even managed to complete this subject will be my magnum opus. This was the subject that completely dominated my year and when I think back on VCE, this will most likely be the subject that I will remember the most. Buckle up kiddos because I have an entire book to write on my experiences in Methods and I honestly don’t blame you if you skip reading the huge wall of text that is below. This is the biggest redemption arc of my schooling life.
It is very important that I set the scene of this subject by detailing my unit 1/2 experience. Most of the year was spent remote learning and during this time I came to the very stark realisation that it is incredibly difficult to learn maths online (hence me dropping my idea of doing specialist via VSV). I started the year off strong, completely every question in every exercise up until the first period of remote learning when I stopped completely exercises completely. It was extremely hard to stay motivated whilst working online and for a lot of my other subjects, the workload had increased drastically as I was basically completing schoolwork from 7:30am-10pm every night with minimal breaks. As you can imagine I burnt out extremely quickly and Methods was the first subject to go. My SAC results hovered around the 60-70 percent mark which doesn’t sound too bad on paper but looking back on the SACs now… they were generally quite straightforward and dare I say easy. I struggled to understand the basic concepts behind basically all the mathematics and was losing more hope every day that progressed. Towards the end of the year, dropping Methods was becoming a more viable option even though I knew it would lock me out of many university choices. I wasn’t the only one, throughout the year our class of around twenty something had dropped down into the low teens. I passed the exam through the skin of my teeth and my percentage was just high enough for me to be allowed to continue the subject… if I wanted to.
Over the transition classes I spent many hours trying to figure out if there was some way to enter these courses without methods but all it turned up was three options: start one course and transfer, do bridging classes and potentially delay starting university by a year or suck it up and try and power through methods. For 15/16 year old me that was a big decision to make and I chose option 3. And let me to tell you, once I sat in the first step up class I hated myself for it. There was basically around seven of us remaining in class, everyone else had decided to drop it completely or switch to Further. I sat in that chair and couldn’t understand the content of Chapter 1 1A, I had no clue about domain or range or what function was what from an equation or what graphs looked like based on a given equation. Over the summer holidays I couldn’t understand the work set and returned to school basically with no work completed and a sense of dread. I needed a 25 ss to satisfy the prerequisite and at that point I wouldn’t have even been able to get a 1 ss.
The first SAC was delayed numerous times due to Covid and remote learning and it was about six periods long over the course of two weeks once we returned onsite. However for the week leading up to it I had done something I had never done before, I had studied… hard. Khan Academy, YouTube, Edrolo… I had used every available resource I could lay my hands on to try and understand graphs, differentiation and how to understand what the worded problems were asking for me to do. Then I became sick with laryngitis and was stuck at home for a week and was so unwell that I couldn’t look at any screens or think straight to save my life. A few negative Covid tests later I returned to school and had to complete the SAC in my study periods whilst still feeling like crap. I cried during the final period I had to finish the SAC because I was so certain that there was no way I had scraped enough marks to pass. The answers to the questions I had answered previously didn’t look right and I wasn’t entering the right equations into the CAS. I threw up after I finished the SAC.
Waiting for my results was one of the worst weeks of my life and I had decided that if I had failed the SAC, that would be the end of Methods for me and I would drop it. During this time our class had dropped down to four students as many left before our results had even been released. I was on the verge of an anxiety attack when our teacher handed out our SACs face down. This is the only SAC that I remember my exact percentage: 76%. With that grade I had secured top ranking of the class and an S for Unit 3. That was the turning point for me in Methods and the moment I realised that maybe I could do this subject to completion.
The rest of the year went by relatively smoothly, my productivity would drop during remote learning but I was able to generally pick myself up and put myself back on track. Towards the tail end of the year I could feel myself burning out and most of the probability unit went in one ear and out the next. I did the coursework but the SAC was held remotely and created by our student teacher who was use to teaching higher level students capable of 40-50s in Methods. No one has ever gotten above a raw 35 in methods at our school. Very quickly I was overwhelmed with pages upon pages of exam revision as well practice exams for both exam 1&2. I felt confident in myself and so attempted my first exam 1.
I got an E+. I didn’t even score in the double digits for marks.
That was a big wake up call and I did hundreds of revision questions and managed to go from an E+ to a C and then finally an A. I was one hundred percent committed to scoring decently on the exam and was (am still) hoping that I would crack that 25 ss. I walked out of exam 1 having answered every question, definitely not correctly but hopefully enough to scrape together a few extra marks. I had spent my birthday the day before cramming out methods and finished off my bound reference after I got home. Exam 2 was a little more iffy as a lot of marks were allocated to the worded box questions (which hurt my head) and being able to find the area under a curve using the rectangle endpoint method (which we didn’t even cover in class for longer than five minutes). Again I’m hopeful that I got enough marks at least for a 25.
WHAT WENT WELL:
- Was able to answer a lot of questions on the exam
- I successfully completed the year
- I was able to push through a lot of doubt about my ability to do the subject
WHAT COULD’VE DONE BETTER:
- Studied more consistently
- Not have relied on cram studying the night or week before SACs in order to pass