This can't end well.

I find it rather amusing, telling people what both my major and minor are. I don't suppose I need to tell you what I'm majoring in (but in case you're curious, read the title of the blog), but my minor is Astronomy. This surprises people, as there seems to be a general notion among physical science majors that we liberal arts folk are a lot of foppish dandies whose romantic, obfuscating worldview distances from the facts of hard science. But I have always been enamored of the stars, I will eagerly devour any books I come across about string theory or general quantum physics, and I am quite possibly the only person in my department who knows what a Schwartzchild radius is, let alone how to calculate one.

Unfortunately, as fascinating as I find most of the world's disciplines, I have never been very good at math. Certainly, I find several concepts within the realm of higher mathematics intriguing (Grahmn's number is always a favorite), most numbers go straight through my head with nary a care.

In order to fulfil my Astronomy minor, I need to take calculus.

The first math course I took upon entering this college was MAT 101X.

Clearly, I have my work cut out for me.

This semester, I am taking MAT 108, best described as "Pre-Pre-Calculus." So, yes, slowly but surely, I am getting there. However, I think I may have trouble concentrating in this class. You see, my professor--

No, this isn't going in the direction you probably think it's going.

My professor, although I do not know his exact genesis, is from somewhere in the general vincinity of India. Perhaps Pakistan, perhaps somewhere else in the Middle East or what the British call the Orient. (I have never been sure whether to classify India as Middle Eastern as Oriental.) His accent is extremely thick, and he occasionally uses grammatical constructs typically avoided in American English. He says things such as "the wedding ceremony of my sister" or "more easier." His speech is notably lacking in some fricative sounds--anthing with a "th" or "sh" in it gets reduced to a /t/, /d/ or /s/.

And rather than being fascinated by his talk on the topic of mathematics (and me realizing that I need to kick myself for forgetting the quadratic formula AGAIN, even though I've had it drilled into me repeatedly), I'm sitting there pondering the nature of the rules that govern his accent (/θ/ -> /d/) and the grammar of his useage of adjectives. As I mentally compile a list of rules for his phonetic pronunciations of words, my hand pantomimes writing them in the air, when I should be simplifying a pair of polynomial fractions.

This is going to be a long year.