4:19 a.m. Unveiling calculus

LAST YEAR AT THIS SAME TIME I was rousing from my bed, throwing on a heavy jacket (remember when it used to be cold in the winter?) and walking toward D.H. Hill -- my final attempt to make sense of all things calculus. I'd calculated, probably incorrectly, that if I made a 98 on the final exam I could get a B- in the class. Hours and hours of studying, all to no avail. Obviously. I'm retaking the class.

As I'm making the same mistake a year later -- certainly 4:24 a.m. can't be the best time to make a certainly less hectic final attempt at remembering the whens and whats of derivatives and who knows what else -- I came across this problem:

1. Find y' (using the quotient rule) and use it to find the equation of the tangent line to the function at the point (2,5).   y= (3x-1)/(x^2-3)

OK. Maybe it's the excessive use of prepositions that makes this sentence utterly incoherent to me, but it just doesn't mean anything. This is what it means in English: 

Take the derivative of the function, plug 2 into y' to find m, and plug everything into the equation y-y1 = m(x-x1).

That is so simple. Last year I looked for the hidden meaning, the method behind the madness, and I didn't find it. I didn't come close. This year, thanks to a much better teacher and a slightly more defined grasp of mathematics, I've found it. There it is, in text -- a method.

Watch me fail.