Personal Narrative: My AP Calculus Class

Resilience is something that I had learned through my hardship in senior year. It was something that was discovered during my most stressful time and saved me from further making myself sick and poisoning my own brain with thoughts of doubt.
My most inspiring and challenging hardship was my AP Calculus class. The name by itself caused for shivers and anxiety. Or better yet the teacher who taught the subject was someone much scarier than the subject itself. The class started off at a face pace in the beginning of the year and gave us a taste of what life was going to be like ahead of us as AP Calculus students. We had homework assignments every day. There was no free time for us. Math was our lives at that point. Not only was it the everyday homework assignments and surprise quizzes that stressed us out, but her tests that we would take every so often would take weeks of studying to prepare for and even then success was not guaranteed. Us, students, had a lot of failures in this class, a lot which were inevitable even with the hours of studying that we did and foregoing other teachers work just to keep our head afloat.

Calculus affected me like most of the other students by increasing both stress and doubt in ourselves, but it also affected me where I had an increase in headaches and overall paranoia that led me to start doubting my abilities.

It even affected my confidence which affected my performance to some degree because I started to believe that I couldn’t do it. I was less enthusiastic about math and the class as a whole because I had become so paranoid and worried that I was going to fail that day due to the amount of stress and lack of sleep I had been getting. When my grades reflected my lack of confidence, sleep and motivation, I knew there was something I had to

do.
I overcame this hardship by gaining confidence and just believing in myself. I started paying attention more to my mistakes than my successes so I could cut out the amount of mistakes I was making. I asked questions more so that I could understand as much as I could and I stayed for tutoring for hours after school so that I could have extra practice with my teacher and other students. I went back home and went over my homework, searching for any and every mistake that I could after my study session and tutoring. I would later go over my homework the next day with fresh eyes and with my friends during free periods so that we could ask each other any lingering questions and work out certain problems. This boosted my confidence, my knowledge and encouraged new relationships with people that I still talk now even though our AP Calculus experience is over.
I was able to bounce back from the stress, pain, and paranoia by making a plan and working hard so that I could achieve the goal of understanding calculus better and getting better grades and just believing that I could do it.