Lost Knowledge
Two girls sitting next to me on the train today were busy cramming for a math test. Listening to them made me realise how much I’ve forgotten. Apparently I can’t do trigonometry any more, and my algebra skills are seriously rusty.
I was a good little student at school and my brain was like a sponge, soaking up knowledge. That knowledge has been slowly dripping out over the years; I’m sure I’ve forgotten half the stuff I learned at school. Of course the forgotten knowledge has been replaced by new and different knowledge, but still it’s sad to think of all that lost information.
I just hope I retain enough to be able to help Aidan with his homework.
I’m in fourth year university, but I doubt I could tutor anybody in first year classes — even the ones that are prereqs for the ones I’m in now! I’ve retained only the bits and pieces that I needed and forgotten the rest. It’s especially bad since I use computer programs to solve automatically all the sorts of problems that we had to do by hand in first year. I can solve all those Calculus 1 problems, but I’d probably fail the exam.