English to Portuguese Art/Literary Other

Then we had to take a course called Quantitative Business Methods. It was a math course. The first day of class, this geek math teacher (who was a total math teacher: dull, dry and two slide rules on his belt) started out by saying, "To pass this class you will need a working knowledge of calculus." Oops! I hadn't taken calculus. I wasn't going to take calculus. I couldn't spell calculus. But I had to have this course to graduate. I sat through the first few classes, but I didn't understand any of it. All these geeks I'd been laughing at in all these other courses were doing fine. They understood everything he was talking about. They had their little slide rules out arguing over the third place decimal to the answer, and I couldn't even get the right handle. I studied for two days for the first test and still only made a 38; the lowest grade in the class — by a lot.