Whoever said math is the same universally was wrong.

For those of you who know me pretty well, you probably know I'm pretty good at math, not to brag or anything. But math is one of my favorite classes. It has always just made sense to me, and I was actually looking forward to going into calculus next year with all my nerd friends. 

Well in Austria, unfortunately, students don't get to choose their classes. Here, everyone of the same year takes the same math classes, science classes, social studies, ect. So I pretty much knew I wouldn't be able to take a calculus class here, but that was probably for the best, since I would be dealing with it in German. It would be fun know all the content and show off to the other students. 

Well that was wrong! 

I'm doing the equivalent of like middle school math here. It's really simple stuff. We've done equivalents, simple exponents, and graphing parabolas, all things I've already learned. But for some reason it's so hard.  

The Austrians learn the most confusing way to do things. And they never use calculators. In my class in America pretty much every student always carries around their big, chunky TI-84 calculator, ready to punch in any equation at a moments notice. Its not that they can do the equations in their head here, they just never use numbers high enough or equations complicated enough to always require such a device. It's like this status I saw on Facebook, "whoever said math is the same universally was wrong." Dead wrong. I just find it really strange here what they have to learn and they way they learn to solve things. But math is probably my most understood class here.