Singing the homework blues

I don't understand this class. It's reminding me why I hated university. I went into the wrong field, one I don't really understand very well. And somehow managed to graduate with an average that is acceptable to work on a masters at most universities. Frightening, isn't it?

So I need a math-like program in order to plot some of these assignment questions. My honey, who is also my hero, is getting me matlab. I don't know if it will help though, my math doesn't seem to work out. I'm going to have to get the prof to do some examples for me, because the math makes no sense to me and he hasn't done any examples in class. All he and the other guy do is sum up the text. Which is okay, because it's not very interesting to read about floating point numbers and such. But then I don't learn anything outside of the text, and the text has no examples. None whatsoever. Have you ever heard of an engineering text that has no numbers? Well, neither had I till now. Engineering is not about fluff, so it seems rather odd that someone managed to write an entire book using minimal math.

It makes me rather disgruntled that they're assigning questions out of texts that use lots of math, but don't actually teach any of it in class. It also annoys me that the assignments are so bloody long. Even if I knew what I was doing, there's an assload of math to be done by hand. What makes me the most angry is that it's all basic calculus and algebra/trig that I don't remember. I barely remember last week, let alone how to integrate. Sigh.