It's been almost a month since I've decided to try revising all the topics of precalculus on my own in order to be able to pass Calculus I placement test and skip both precalculus I and II. Unfortunately, it seems that all the forces of nature have been working very hard to put as many hindrances on my way as possible. First, I was sent a wrong textbook by amazon, which set my preparation back for at least one week. Then, I was sick as a dog for one whole weekend, which, taking to consideration that weekends are pretty much the only time I can really devote myself to studying Math, was very unfortunate. In addition, the teachers seemed to agree to assign as much homework as possible just when I needed some extra free time the most.

During these few weeks, I decided to give up more than once, mostly at the moments when my brain was about to start boiling from all the information I was trying to retain. Having skipped a day or two, however, I suddenly remembered that giving up was not my thing and that I should look at the whole preparation challenge as at a small-scale test of my willpower and determination. So I opened the book again and read about sines and cosines, permutations and combinations, linear and quadratic equations, logarithmic and exponential functions, matrices and determinants, sequences, series, probability and many other things. At the moment, I have only one chapter on Analytic Geometry left to revise.

To my great surprise and satisfaction, I still remember pretty much all of these concepts from school. The problem, however, lies in the fact that I find it difficult to keep all of this information in my memory simultaneously. For example, having read a chapter about Trigonometry, I can solve pretty much all the problems in the textbook without any problem. Unfortunately, a few days later, having studied another chapter or two on a different topic, I tend to forget many things I learned about Trigonometry just a few days ago. Taking into consideration that, in a few weeks, I managed to review a year worth of precalculus material, this tendency does not surprise me at all. However, as far as test I'll be taking in a few days is concerned, this is definitely not a good thing. At the moment, I think my chances of passing it are 50/50 assuming they allow graphing calculator, which is not very promissing :((