Math and Physics kills.

A thousand drums. Rhythmic waves of destruction followed every blow. I buried both my ears in my palms but the rude, hollow thumpings were far from inaudible. I fell on my knees - on what felt like dirt. With great effort, I opened my eyes against the chilly gale beating relentlessly on my face. The landscape was barren, dark and hinted in every way of an imminent sandstorm.

“How are you doing?”

The storm vanished into thin air as Ms. Cynthia appeared beside me to check on my progress. A mess of scribbled algebraic functions, numbers and workings came into focus as I peered at the stack of foolscap paper on my table. Intergration, pfft. The reality wasn’t any better.

The air-conditioner above my head on full blast threatened to freeze the gears in my head grinding to a halt. My head weighed twice as heavy and felt like it could fall thump on the table any time. Then there’s this constant throbbing going on at the temples so bad, that you feel that urge to bang your head repeatedly against walls.

My sanity is at stake.

That’s Engineering Mathematics B for you.

I figured a little break would do.

Semester two feels soou tough. I don’t know, perhaps its because of the rather laid-back three-subject Summer Semester we had before this. Or it could be just that semester two subjects are just more challenging. Or was it the lectures that made the difference?

The language and IT subjects were okay, if not bearable. At least they don’t pose the danger of getting flunked, only that burden of semester-long assignments they require of you.

But oh boy, the Math and Physics subjects are a whole different story.

Picture by Julie Auriemma.

There are Finite Math lecturers who’d just mercilessly cramp three bloody mind-boggling subtopics in an one-hour lecture. Leaving you gasping for air not even ten minutes into the class. Then there are Physics B lectures which I simply cant keep up.

Lecturers just love to explain concepts in long-winding ways so complicated nobody ever understands. Of course, it is only the ultimate goal of an educator to get the point across to his students in the most comprehensible way possible. But no matter how hard they try, at the end of lectures you’d just find it hard not to say, ‘Huh.?’

To cook up a lame analogy, if you’d ask them for directions to the cafeteria next door, they would draw you a world map, point at the Himalayan region with a thud, ask you to scale Everest’s peak and back down, make your way under Paris’ Arc de Triomphe, swim across the Atlantic, get sucked into a fourth dimension off the coast of Bermuda and poof, you’re at the cafeteria next door.

Make no mistake though, Swinburne’s got great lecturers. There’s this obvious effort by the University to woo in quality lecturers, complete with PhD. certs or Masters in qualifications. And the lecturers we have are brilliant, they know their stuff and they certainly have the passion to teach.

Mind boggling Engineering Math B lectures.

The Math and Physics subjects of semester two has got to be the toughest stuff yet.

Not-any-better-if-not-worst Physics B lectures.

Notice how both lecturers share the same hairstyles. They are walking testaments of what these subjects could do to you. Period.

If it helps, I have a Finite Math test coming up tomorow. Shove me a question and all I have in mind is a Large. Void. Blank.

*Gaspeth.*