Hate on Math

I swear math is the devil. If there is one general subject which creates the most complexes the most anxiety and altogether determines a future, it is mathematics. Unlike english which is found tangibly in multiple forms and can be improved on through these multiple forms, mathematics encountered in grade school is much more abstract and is mostly tangibly found in textbooks and teachers who teach it.

There’s a kid sitting across from me in a tutoring session and the subject is high school math. They’re talking about inverses and functions and making up graphs to solve a problem  — stuff I’ve long forgotten and am so grateful that I no longer have to care about. I hope the kid in front of me is doing a lot better with his tutor than if he didn’t have one.

I was never good at math. Grade 3 and the coming of memorizing the multiplication table was just the beginning, so understand my vexation of rumours how children may no longer need to memorize them (I can’t find any articles at the moment so hopefully it was a silly rumour). Growing up being an asian who wasn’t good at math was just terrible when the great majority of your peers got it. It gave you inferiority complexes to yourself and your own intelligence when time and time again you were segregated out to the not-good-at-math category and you just didn’t know how to get out of it because the way people were speaking to you just wasn’t getting through for one reason or another,it was as if it was another language altogether. Indeed, it is language and ways of approaching things that made a difference I would later find out. Elementary school was a God forsaken vacuum where things were abouts the mediocre same every year, no wonder nothing improved til later.

Getting out of elementary school was the best thing ever at the time. The diversity as compared to the earlier years was just so much more liberating even if it was also exhausting due to it being the teenage years. I’ll always be thankful for my friends in high school, those who are still with me and those otherwise. Thank you for helping me out in math and science, for being the tutors that I needed when the language of my dad’s abilities had my eyes going around in circles.

The internet is just wonderful isn’t it? I’m stating the obvious here, but seriously with what you can learn on youtube, its freakin’ amazing. The last few months I’ve looked up makeup tutorials, how to clean wood surfaces, how to bind a book and double checking my sewing techniques to see if they were correct. I wish there was a Khan Academy when I was squeezing out blood, sweat and tears to comprehend math. A bit of a hyperbole there, but it wasn’t completely off.

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