"I've forgotten all the maths I ever learnt at school but I've never needed it," they say. I'm not sure how they've survived. They'd probably own up to being able to add and subtract, multiply and divide, but almost all of the GCSE/O level syllabus is useful in daily life. For a start, if you want to work out how much the banks will fleece you for using a credit card you need percentages and fractions. If you want to understand the graphs of Tory cuts you need a little statistics. If you want to enjoy the Great British Bake Off you need to appreciate pi.
But at degree level things are different. The stuff you learn is probably only useful if you're going to be working in a maths environment, as a programmer or a scientist or an actor on The Big Bang Theory. It's difficult to see how i, the square root of -1, which doesn't actually exist except in maths, can help down the supermarket. A lot of what I learned last year in MST209 Mathematical method and models won't ever be put into use unless, come the revolution, I need to calculate the trajectory of a mortar. But in my next module all this might change. Before then I still had the previous course to finish and yesterday, while sitting its examination, I had a genuinely new OU experience.
Exam time is usually stressful and much of that is a result of the way that the OU structures its course results. Unless you're new to the OU you'll know that your overall module mark is whichever is worse, your course work score or your exam score. Back in 1997, on my first module - an object-oriented programming course - I was unaware of this. I assumed that having achieved coursework in the high 90s I'd only need to turn up for the exam and do moderately well to pass the module with a decent mark. Overconfidence is rarely rewarded. I hardly revised, which, as you might have guessed, turned out to be a huge mistake.
'It was the first exam that didn't start with five minutes of blind panic. I should've worn shorts and flipflops and taken along a couple of cocktails'
The programming module was in its first year of presentation, which I've since learnt is always a gamble. First, you don't have access to a stack of past exam papers, but also some new modules have teething problems and this course had a set of gnashers like Shane McGowan. The exam paper was an absolute stinker, requiring me to remember not just facts from the course books but examples too, which of course I didn't. One question was a fill-in-the-blanks type affair with so many empty spaces that I could have completed it with a limerick about a man from Nantucket. Rather than passing the module with the distinction that I should easily have managed, I ended up with a Grade Three. And this was a bit embarrassing for me on an object-oriented programming course because at the time I was working as a full-time object-oriented programmer.
In all the modules since then I've always managed Grade Two or above but this year's course - M208 Pure mathematics - has presented new difficulties, most of which are due to the bike ride. Because OU maths courses (and only maths courses) require assignments to be sent via snail mail my tutor's comments were posted home, meaning that I had no access to them. As a result of repeatedly making the same kinds of error throughout the module I can now only achieve Grade Three at best even if I were to score 100% in the exam.
The genuinely new OU experience was that, without the pressure to perform, the revision process and yesterday's exam were much more relaxed. This time I really did only need to do moderately well and it wouldn't affect my overall score. The chilled atmosphere was aided by being able to take along the course handbook to the exam as well as annotate it, which feels a bit like cheating but I'll take all the help I can. It was the first exam that didn't start with five minutes of blind panic. I should've worn shorts and flipflops and taken along a couple of cocktails.
Now that M208 lies behind me I'm excited about my next module, which started before M208 finished. MT365 Graphs, networks and design is a problem-solving course and one of those problems is to find the best route from Land's End to John o'Groats. While those two towns aren't on next year's itinerary I hope I can use the same techniques to find the shortest distance between 2013's capitals. For the majority of the route, the best order to visit the cities is clear but there's a not so obvious section involving Kiev, Belarus, Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga, Tallin and Moscow and hopefully MT365 can help to keep the mileage down. Who says maths is useless?
