How High School Calculus Destroyed My Love of Math

The story of what it was like taking Math AP and how it impacted my life

Content Warning: This post contains mentions of depressing thoughts.

My early love of math

As a child and young teen, there was no time in my life when I disliked math. To me, math was fun, whether simple like counting or more advanced like solving quadratic equations. I remember loving math in elementary school, even working ahead in my math workbooks, purely because I enjoyed doing so. When my class did “mad minutes,” in which we had to answer as many math problems in a minute as we could, I was probably the only student who liked them. Word problems were especially satisfying, given their extra layer of reading comprehension in addition to the actual math involved. Even the games I played involved math; I loved “Snowy’s Friend” and “Sketch’s World” on Multiplication.com and the math-related stuff in “Quizzy’s Corner” from Webkinz.

Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash

Throughout all of these years, math was a passion of mine. Not quite as much as reading, but I always found comfort in numbers. They were predictable and unchanging in a confusing world, the answer to each problem the same every time. Whether it was performing long division, converting between improper fractions and mixed numbers, calculating the surface area of various shapes, or solving basic algebraic equations, learning math was exciting!

The grade nine polynomial quiz disaster

Later on, when I was fourteen years old and in grade nine, my class started learning polynomials. As a bit of background, when I was in junior high, my school only had two core classes: these were humanities (a combination of English and social), and STEM (a combination of math and science), which meant that our teachers could teach more of one subject than another. My grade nine STEM teacher was more of a science guy, and I do not believe he devoted as much time to teaching math as he should have. Even when he taught math, he often failed to explain things in a way I could understand, which was certainly not ideal. So, when our class had a quiz on this confusing new thing known as polynomials, it should be no surprise that the class did not perform well, myself included.

I scored a four out of ten on that quiz; this was unheard of. Upon seeing this horrific mark, I lost a lot of confidence in my mathematical abilities. For so long, I had been known as a “math person,” but… did this quiz change that?

Choosing my grade ten classes

It was also right around this time that I had to choose my classes for grade ten. After the teachers explained to us what the different classes were like, the first step was to fill out a sheet on which we wrote the classes we wanted to take. Since this part had happened just before the polynomial quiz, I had my heart set on taking Math AP, meaning “advanced placement,” which is the class for the highest achieving academic students. However, things changed after that quiz took place.

Wednesday, February 14th, 2018, was the dreaded day on which each grade nine student was to meet with their two core teachers to discuss which level of core classes they should register for the next school year. With the results of the quiz fresh in my mind, I was incredibly conflicted over which stream of math I wanted to pursue, and when my math teacher asked if I still wanted to take Math AP, I confessed my uncertainty. He then said I should go into Math 10C, the regular grade ten math class that most students go into, as Math AP was quite intense, and I should be certain about the decision if I wanted to go into it.

So, I accepted my STEM teacher’s advice and registered for Math 10C. It was disappointing, as I had always prided myself on my high levels of academic achievement, but I believed this was probably the right choice, given recent events.

Retaking the quiz

After the whole polynomial quiz thing, I realized I had to take matters into my own hands because simply listening to my teacher and doing the classwork was not going to cut it. So, I began doing the adding, subtracting, and multiplying polynomials exercises on Khan Academy, pouring hours of my free time after school and during lunch break into doing this. At first, I made a lot of mistakes, but eventually, I caught on.

Given the fact that our class had performed so poorly on the quiz, our teacher decided to give us a second quiz that would take the place of the first one in our marks. So, when the time for that one rolled around on Wednesday, February 28th, I was confident I would perform much better than I had on the one before. Sure enough, I did, earning myself no less than a perfect score of 100%.

This experience taught me that although math could be hard, I was able to do it if I worked hard. Instead of thinking I was stupid and giving up after an experience with failure, I persevered, and it gave me a renewed desire to take math AP in high school. Now, I just had to find a way to impress my teacher so he would recommend me for the AP class.

A photo of me from the end of grade nine, taken on Thursday, June 21st, 2018

The big, scary test

Now, where I live, we have these things called Provincial Achievement Tests, or PATs for short. These are big, fancy tests done by every student in the province for certain grades, grade nine being one of them. Although we had already registered for our high school classes, my STEM teacher said our PAT results could affect the classes he recommended we take. They were more likely to get us moved down a stream, if anything, but he did say there was a small chance we could get moved up if our test performance was particularly impressive. Unfortunately for me, a non-calculator math exam was introduced the year I was in grade nine, meaning there were no exams from previous years we could use to practice. Thankfully, this new non-calculator test was only worth 20% of our overall math exam score, as the remaining 80% of our mark was from the calculator portion, but I still did not like the idea of writing it.

So, the date for the non-calculator test arrived, and it was brutal. There were twenty questions, all of them numerical-response, and we were not given very much time to do them. The pressure of time was INTENSE, and for someone like me, who likes to take my time on tests by checking and double-checking my answers, it was not a good experience. I started with the questions that seemed the easiest to me and ended up having to leave three of them blank, as time ran out, and they were just hard questions that I did not feel at all prepared to answer.

The second part of the math test, for which calculators could be used, was easier for me. It consisted of thirty-two multiple-choice questions and eight numerical-response ones. After writing, I had to wait for some time until I could see my results, and they came back showing 45% for Part A and 88% for Part B. As I wrote in my diary after discovering these marks:

Sunday, June 24th, 2018 3:32 PM

…So, you’ve probably realized that the mark for Math Part A is terrible. Horrible. Disaterous. Horiffic. Yeah. I know. The day I got the mark I cried. At school. In the bathroom. Tears streamed down my face. I did so bad. I was disappointed. [My teacher] probably was to [sic]. I wanted to prove to him that I could take math ap in high school. I loved math. I was good at it. Excellent actually. Until the pat. I thought I could do it. I really did. And I felt terrible. I man like how could I be so foolish? Just to think that if I study lots, I’ll do super good on the pat, totally wow [my teacher] and get moved up a class? Well life just doesn’t work that way. I failed. I honestly did. And now my whole plan has backfired completely. [My teacher] will have to move me down. Down. Not up. Down. To the class for all the dumb kids. I’ll never have a good education, never get a good job. Never suceed in anything. All because of a stupid pat. The test that ultimately ruined my life. I’m scared. I honestly am. What will happen to me now? [My teacher] said that he was serious when he said that the marks on the pat could change our high school course recommendations. I believe him. I know it has to happen. As much as I wish for things to be different, I’ll still be moved down. Down, down, down.

Soon after writing that, my dad emailed my teacher, who said that my 45% was not a big deal. Still, it bothered me greatly, and even the 88%, while not a bad mark, was lower than I had hoped for. All my worries about being moved down a class were for nothing, but I had botched my chance at ever getting into Math AP. Or so I thought.

Getting into Math 10 AP

Spoiler alert: I did get into Math AP. It just did not happen the way I thought it would.

Well, I started high school after the summer holidays. As I was put in math for the second semester of grade ten, my mother pressured me to talk to a school counsellor about changing classes near the end of the first semester. The idea of doing this was completely and absolutely terrifying to the unknowingly autistic and extremely anxiety-ridden fifteen-year-old Rachel, but I somehow managed to work up the courage to book an appointment to speak with my counsellor. The meeting was to take place on the early afternoon of Wednesday, January 16th, 2019, during my foods class.

That was a very stressful day. My foods class was a bit of a chaotic mess, as we had a substitute teacher, the members of my foods group were extraordinarily unreliable, and I was in the meeting for part of class, which took my much-needed cooking time away from me. But the meeting went better than I had expected. Was I shaking and sweating in fear? One hundred percent. And yet, it was actually quite simple. I left the meeting having been registered in Math 10 AP for the next semester.

My grade ten and eleven math experience

As soon as the second semester began, I was glad to have gotten into the AP class. It was fun—not only was I learning a lot, but I got to be in a class with other students who genuinely loved the subject material and wanted to be there. Reflecting upon the first day of Math AP, I wrote, “I was expecting it to be hard but today was actually quite easy. We did things with square roots and cube roots of fractions. I got a small amount of homework but finished it.”

Overall, grade ten math went very well for me. There was a time when I only got 78.33% on a test, which literally brought tears to my eyes (I may have been a bit of a perfectionist concerning my grades…), but I got 100% on at least two, and I finished the class with a final mark of 95%.

In grade eleven, I took Math 20 AP in the first semester and Math 30 AP in the second so that I could take the Math 31 AP calculus course during the entirety of my grade twelve school year. I had been warned that the beginning of Math 20 would be challenging, as it was for almost everyone, and it was. My mark on the first quiz was 23/30, or 76.67%, which was not a good mark in my books, but it was higher than my class’s average. Yes, even AP students found the jump from grade ten math to grade eleven math quite difficult!

We had started with quadratic functions, and they were pretty confusing at first, but I improved with practice and soon came to enjoy working with quadratics more than linear functions. My teacher was also excellent, as was my math teacher in grade ten, so that was a big help because they were both clearly passionate about math and just taught stuff a whole lot better than my grade nine teacher. I earned 93% on the second quiz and 97% on the third one, so my hard work was paying off, and I loved being in Math AP. If only my grade nine STEM teacher could see me now, I would think. He thought I was not good enough for this class, and here I am proving him wrong!

I finished that course with a final mark of 94%, ever so slightly less than my mark in grade ten, but not a bad one overall. Then, I had Math 30 AP with a different teacher. That teacher was not one I liked much. He taught math well, and I would not call him a bad teacher, but I just found him really scary, and he was kind of mean. Anyway, I still enjoyed math, and school was going well… until the COVID lockdowns happened.

The struggles of online school

It was in mid-March 2020 that my school was closed, and it remained that way for the rest of the school year. To be very clear, I was against lockdowns from the beginning, writing on Thursday, March 12th, “Honestly I don’t get why there’s such a fuss, only old and sick people die from [COVID-19], and everyone is going to be exposed to it sooner or later.” So, when my school shut down, I was devastated. School was my life; I poured so much time, effort, and energy into it, studying like a maniac and obsessing over my grades. On the day the closure was announced, I wrote, “My days will become empty and meanigless [sic],” which shows just how much school meant to me. And yes, I also cried about it.

Online school started ten days later, which felt like an eternity, and while I was glad to get back into my classes, I did not like the online learning format. To make problems worse, certain people in my life repeatedly took my phone and Chromebook away from me, thus preventing me from doing schoolwork, which caused me to become extremely stressed. I realize this is all a bit of a tangent (pun intended), so I will keep this brief. The point is: learning math from online classes was difficult for me, and I think I would have performed better in the course if we had continued with in-person classes.

The math things we were doing at this time were logarithms and the unit circle, which I have completely forgotten how to do. To be honest, I do not think I ever really understood either of them, and I found much of the material confusing. However, my school put in place a rule that if our final grade in a class at the end of the semester was lower than our mark just before online school started, that earlier mark would become our final course mark. As this was the case for me, I received a 94% in the class because that was my mark in mid-March. So, I registered in Math 31 AP for grade twelve.

The beginnings of the scary calculus course

My final year of high school, which was back in person, was divided into quarters instead of two semesters. This was supposedly to lessen COVID spread by reducing the amount of movement going on at school, as we only had two classes per day. Not only did that make classes painfully long (two and a half hours—ugh!), but it meant that Math 31 AP would get squeezed into a single quarter instead of being spread out over the entire school year, as it had always been done previously. I believe we still had the same amount of class time, as it was only every other school day when done for the whole year, but it gave me less time to study and absorb the material. Also, since the math class was not until the third quarter, it meant that there was a significant gap of time in which I was not taking math, so I forgot much of what I had learned in online school. But then again, just think of all the lives we saved doing it this way! Doing two semesters as usual would have made all these high school students start dropping like flies… or something.

Although the third quarter started well, it did not remain that way for long. After my first week of classes, I wrote, “School has been going well,” but twenty days later, that turned into “School has not been going so great.” The cause? My math mark was 72. Yeah, you read that right. This course was HARD. Thankfully, my other class this quarter was creative writing, which I loved, and I do not want to imagine what it would have been like to have taken another core class in this quarter instead.

Then, we had a midterm test. Here is what I wrote about it:

Saturday, March 13th, 2021 4:56 PM My Room

Yesterday was the no calculator part of the midterm. The questions are the types of questions that are on the AP exam and it was the hardest test I have ever written. I’m really going to do so bad in math.

So… math was going very poorly for me. But, it was about to get worse!

Tuesday, March 16th, 2021 10:02 AM Math Classroom

I don’t know what’s happening to me. Creative writing is going very well, I got 100% on my 1200 word story, and we recently did poetry which I really enjoyed. But math is a completely different story. I can’t understand ANYTHING. I’m so confused during every lesson, I don’t know how to do the homework, and I’m just so sick of trying. On the highway project, I got 9/10, but the midterm I got 43%. And tbh, I was happy when I saw that mark. Like I couldn’t stop smiling happy to get 43%. Yes, it was the hardest test I’ve ever written, but oof. Then I got upset and started crying. I don’t know what’s wrong with me! There’s no way I’m passing the AP exam. No way. Ugh, this is sooo hard. I used to love math. It was my favourite subject! Now I look forward to it about as much as I look forward to emptying the trash. I probably got the lowest midterm mark in the class. I’m used to getting one of the best marks of the class! There were times I was the only person in my class to get 100% on a certain test. I feel like a failure. Part of my identity was loving math! It’s like I’m a totally different person than I used to be. If it wasn’t for the stupid quarter system, I would probably do better. I have to finish my study guide and assignment for tomorrow, but I haven’t even started them! This is so unlike me. Idk what’s going on. I honestly dread going to school every day. All because of stupid math 31 AP. Hopefully I can learn something from all this. After all, failure is the biggest opportunity for growth. Bye for now. I should really do my homework. Today I’m going to the library at lunch. I’m kinda tempted to just not come back to math after lunch. What on earth is wrong with me!?!?

Yeah, it was rough. Very much so. For the first time in my life, I hated math. The course was incredibly difficult and confusing, which meant I was no longer motivated to study because all my efforts seemed futile. I literally did not want to go to school anymore, and that was completely unheard of.

The depressing poetry era

I cried so much throughout this time. When my mental health is in a good place, I hardly ever cry, and I can go for several months without shedding a single tear. But in March and April of 2021, I became a complete blubbering mess, crying nearly every day. Creative writing was the only bright spot in my life; all I wanted to do was lie on my bed watching anime and forgetting that math even existed. It truly felt like all the life had been sucked out of me, and that I was some sort of empty shell of a person who no longer liked the things that once brought me joy. So, I wrote some depressing poems.

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021 9:36 PM My Room

my mind is consumed

with negative thoughts.

it is a toxic place

i cannot

escape

every day

i cry

tears shed

over failure,

because of math.

i am not

the person

i once was.

my life

enveloped within

a dark storm cloud

obscuring

my vision

penetrating

my mind

an overwhelming weight

hangs over

my head.

sometimes i wish

i was

dead.

---

Wow. That was a depressing poem. But it’s really how I feel. This is so hard for me. Today I got 0% on my study guide. I’m not even lying. Ouch. I have no idea whatsoever is going on with math. Six, seven, maybe eight times I have cried today. There are bright spots, like creative writing. I am writing a short story called Juliana’s Journey set in a fictional world and that is very fun. But otherwise the only thing I look forward to is weekends. Every day I dread going to school. I don’t understand how my happiness has plumetted so fast. If only I knew before registering that math 31 AP would suck the life out of me. I hardly ever read anymore. My life is crumbling, and I feel truly alone. I hate math. I despise it, disdain it, abhor it. I used to be such a happy person. Now I’m always sad. This quarter really can’t end too soon.

I seriously regretted my decision to take this class, and I so desperately wanted to drop out of it. Yet, I did not because “certain people in my life” who must not be named did not want me to. Fortunately, I had a week off from school, and my mom, sister, and I went to stay with relatives. Of this, I wrote, “This week there was no school. I’ve hardly thought about math and I’m feeling much better.” Unfortunately, the quarter was not yet over.

On Sunday, April 11th, I wrote:

Math has been going better. I’m just honestly not trying very hard and I’ve felt way better about it. I still hate my mark, 67% gah it’s the worst thing ever and it makes me feel so stupid and it’s the lowest mark I’ve ever gotten in a class and grr but I’m really trying to not let it bother me.

I felt better for a while, but only for a while. As I wrote just a few days later:

Thursday, April 15th, 2021 7:50 PM My Room

the world melts away

in a cloud of despair,

an ocean of tears

carries me away.

i’m drowning

suffocating,

can’t breathe anymore.

feel like i’m

falling

my mind is shaking

my heart is breaking

i am sinking

deep

soon i’ll be dead.

the wound runs too far

blood

gushes

out

i know i’ll never be the same.

shivering in the

frigid cold,

i fade away.

how many times

have i died today

each time worse than the

one before

soon i’ll have nothing left.

my hopes

my dreams

accomplishments,

lessons learned

things i’ve made,

all vanish

are washed away

i crumble into

dust.

The aftermath

The day after I wrote that was the last day of the third quarter, and the fourth quarter started the next week. I was so incredibly glad to be done with my math class, but I still had the AP exam on the fourth of May. However, the force was not with me on that day because I failed the test. By that point, though, I truly did not care. The AP exam did not even count toward our class marks, as we had a different final exam; it was just to get college credit, which I did not care about. I somehow managed to finish the class with a final mark of 70%, so I technically passed, but it felt like a major failure to me.

Once the course was over, I felt significantly better. My experience with Math 31 AP caused me to care less about marks, which I suppose is good. When I took English in the last quarter, I only received a 68% in the course. Before, getting such a low mark would have felt horrible, but after all the stress of my calculus course, I was just glad to pass English and be done with high school. When I went to Bible college that Fall, I obviously liked getting high marks, but I never put pressure on myself to achieve a certain grade.

As far as math goes, I kind of avoided anything more than simple arithmetic for some time. Yet I still had a love of math buried deep down. It was only this year when I decided to start working my way through the entirety of the Algebra I course on Khan Academy; at the time of writing this, I have completed the first three units. Yes, the math is below my level, but it has been good to review these things. I plan to move on to more advanced stuff once I finish this, and maybe one day I will attempt calculus again.

So, did high school calculus really destroy my love of math? Yes and no. In the moment, it was agonizing; I wanted nothing to do with math. But I truly do not think anything in this world could completely eradicate my love of math. It was always there, and will continue for as long as I live.

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If you liked this post, you might also like another one in which I tell a story of something from my life, all about my experience working at a super crazy summer camp.

That Time I Worked at a Charismatic Summer Camp