Mathematic Achievement

Margaret Thatcher once said: “Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction.”   This says, to me, that while pride, self-esteem and personal satisfaction can be achieved in any number of ways, the best way to achieve this is to choose something difficult, morally right and of importance. In other words, the achievement of doing something that is difficult, something that is right, something of importance is how one can take that “high road” to pride, self-esteem and personal satisfaction. Personal satisfaction plays a decent role in my pride. It all comes down to what I think of my own actions. Before I do things I often ask myself a few questions. “What effect will this have on me?” “What effect will this have on others?” “What will this say about me?” “Would I be willing to share this with others?”   If I can’t say “yes” to that last question, it’s almost definitely a bad decision to make.
I’ve seldom felt that sense of pride and self-satisfaction during my academic career. I had that feeling a year ago during the first term of the 2011-2012 school year. It was my sophomore year and I had been in my trigonometry class for about a week when I realized I had no reason wasting my time in that level of mathematics. I love math but I was utterly bored in trigonometry. I found that I was bored because I already knew the work. It was simply too easy for me. I need a logical challenge. I had heard that a pre-calculus class was fairly small, student wise, and they were offering juniors and seniors, who felt that the class was moving a bit slow, the opportunity to skip trigonometry. I then took it upon myself to talk with my current teacher and the pre-calculus teacher about doing so as well.
Because I was a sophomore having finished an Algebra 2 course the previous year, they were skeptical about allowing me to skip this vital course. Another three weeks later and...