Philomathy (the love of maths)

I love maths. No, seriously, I do! Although there are plenty of things that I can think of that I'd rather be doing than doing a GCSE maths paper in a room of bipolar climate, I actually quite enjoyed 'helping' some friends with their revision by dreaming up trigonometry questions that were sufficiently difficult to be of a standard that would never come close to an AQA GCSE paper (needless to say, I am now short of a few friends; their heads exploded. This is a true n'yawwwww moment).

I say this because, lying in front of me, there is a challenging maths problem. It's one of these ones that has an incredibly long answer, so I won't attempt it until I have an hour or so to kill, but I shall eventually venture to do it. I look forward to it. In fact, I recall that as I was doing work experience at my primary school approximately a year ago, there was an incredibly brainy maths genius, who, at the age of 9, enjoyed doing maths. He noticed that I shared his passion, and consequently asked me to set him some maths to do over the summer. So I was hard at work, creating all manner of testing problems, then it occurred to me - he was 9. I feel that standard deviation and trigonometry will have been a little above his capabilities, but I gave him them anyway. I have not heard back from him yet.

So, as it is just 35 minutes until I must depart for my exam, I felt a need to write something about my feelings this morning. Given how absolutely zippadeedooda my exams have gone so far, it's certainly one of confidence. I almost feel on top of the world, but then my logic kicks in and reminds me that that's physically impossible. I feel wonderful, having finished for all eternity both my studies of the English language, and indeed, English literature; I daresay that my vocabulary will expand as I move into the future, and I shall certainly read more books, but I never have to complete the banal process of copying down notes dictated to me ever again. On poetry.

I've enjoyed maths over the past five years at this school; I feel it could've been a little more challenging, but that's just me. I'm looking forward to my continuation of it at college, where I will be taking further maths, which effectively means that I will be doing pure maths, statistics, decision, and mechanics, rather than just two of the four. I could do without the mechanics - I would've chosen to skip further education rather than continuing a full Physics course - but beggars can't be choosers (I can't help but feel that that's not the most appropriate proverb, but my mind escapes me for the moment).

I'll leave you for now by saying that in addition to having far fewer functions, non-scientific calculators are generally less durable; having found a spare scientific calculator on the floor, I decided to conduct a comparative test of durability - in other words, dropping two calculators from a second floor (third floor to Americans) window. The scientific one survived, whilst I had to make an unfortunate grave for the standard one, although if I'd used my usual scientific calculator for this experiment, I would now be taking a geometry exam without a 'Pi' function.

The moral of the story is this: don't drop calculators out of second floor windows.