While I acknowledge that many challenges in life are not academic in nature, my most challenging experience was taking a course titled “Advanced Algebra 2”.While I have excelled in many academic subjects--as I have even taken three Dartmouth College courses-- Mathematics has never come easily to me. Sitting in a small classroom with thirty other students, I may as well have been in a foreign language course that I was not familiar with. The day that our first test grades came back, I was astonished. I had recieved my lowest grade in my academic career, a fifty-four percent. While this was a low enough grade for me to want to drop the course entirely, I decided to schedule a meeting with my teacher in order to understand my mistakes. Many people