This Miserable, Miserable Class

I am miserable! I am in a biostatistics class this semester, and for the first time in my college career, I am absolutely struggling with understanding the material being taught. Algebra was difficult, but I could get it. I disliked my geography class, but the issue was the instructor–not so much the material. My world cultures class was another black experience, but again, it was the instructor and not the content. This biostatistics mess–well, I’m all but drowning in my misery. My friend Sarah is taking the class with me, and she has been playing the role of being the encourager. Usually that’s my role, but I just can’t do it–I’m much too depressed. "It'll be over in five more classes," she said. Not much of a comfort, in my opinion.

The tests are open-book, open-note, and can be done over a span of several days. You can work on the test for a while, save it, then come back to it later. There's no time limit. But don't kid yourself. The tests are awful. It took me four solid hours to complete the thing, and I never could find some of the answers and had to end up guessing.

It started out ok enough. We were calculating things like the mean, the mode, and the median. I can understand the purpose for those particular calculations and can see the practicality in using them. But now... NOW we are into calculating probability, confidence intervals, z scores, t scores, and critical values. We are testing hypotheses and determining whether tests are one-tailed or two-tailed.

The formulas we deal with are both miserable and incomprehensible. I really need to be far, far away from anything statistics-related.

Like I said, I’m miserable.