All my years of education had gone to waste!!!

Ok... People who have known me well would know that Maths has been my favourite subject... I won't say that it was during my years of primary school, but throughout sec 1 and 2, it definitely has been a great part of my life. I remember the first few weeks of my life upon entering Carine SHS in 2005 as Year 10 was just horrible!!! In Maths, I had no idea what a freaking gradient and y-intercept was... And apparently, it's revision from Year 9, but for God's sake, I wasn't even here for Year 9, and we weren't taught that back in EVG... Anyways, that didn't stop me from liking Maths, and it was all cool for Year 11 and 12 as I went on to do double-maths:)

So upon entering Uni, we had to pick 4 units for the semester... As I didn't know what majors I am doing, but I'm quite certain in choosing between Finance, Management and/or Accounting, thus the student advisor said that I should do double-maths since it's a prerequisite for Quantitative Finance. Since I am already doing Financial Accounting and Organisational Behaviour (management), I thought to myself 'might as well just do double-maths to get an experience of what each major is about'... So units were picked, and I'm all happy:) But due to everyone freaking me out about how doing double-maths is a definite NO-NO situation (yea, thanks to Sze Howe and Sharon and many others...), I decided to drop MATH1010 finally, thus doing MATH1020 only... So now I truly think that I have lessen my workload, and this sem is gonna be alright for me... Little did I know that it was only the beginning of a nightmare!!!

First day into the Alexander Lecture Theatre filled with more than 200 people at 9am, it was already quite a bit to take in, considering we only had like 14 people in our BCC class??? Hmmn... Lol... Anyways, after the lecturer went on for quite a bit, he moved on to the so-called revision questions which is the main point of this post... Just one question he wrote on the board was as follows:
l2x - 1l + x + 3 ≥ l3x + 2l . To think that someone like me who was so passionate about Maths, and even did Calculus in Year 12, had no idea how to do this freaking question, just due to the fact that I haven't got a Graphics Calculator!!!

What have I done to myself here? Was my education all these years gone to waste, especially my 3 years of High School here, since all I had depended on was a $100+ Graphics Calculator!!! Sigh...

endnote: reliance on something is a bad thing at times:(