My daughter heaved a sigh of relief after her maths paper and I perfectly understood the feeling. The four letter word that terrified and harassed me through school life was MATH.
No matter what I did or how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get it right. So terrified I was of maths, that my hands used to go cold by the end of the paper( they are called as panic attacks) and I used to get nightmares of writing maths paper long after I had passed 10th. Thankfully due to memory gaps, I have forgotten most of my trying days but some events are still etched on my mind.
Every simplification complicated my life while factorization created those many hurdles. During the Math paper, I was the first one to ask for supplements. Most of my time went in scribbling over rough sheets. I always managed to get different answers by different methods and finally left the honorous task to the teacher, to choose the problems that were solved correctly.
The one topic that I never liked was quadratic equations and also the ones where the water tank has two taps, one that fills with x diameter and one that empties it with y diameter. And we had figure out when the tank would get emptied..now my naive mind always had a question ..why would you want to fill a tank, only to empty it out and what would I learn by solving this. Take another example, one train of x length travelling at some speed crosses the other train of Y length travelling at some another speed, in xy minutes, so calculate when they would eventually cross each other ....WHY why must you torture kids by giving these kind of problems.
Needless to say that I the moment I passed 10th, I dropped it like a hot brick and ran in the opposite direction. I don’t know how but I think God really, honestly came and wrote my maths paper else how can I explain a distinction in that subject. All was fine, till I came to my MBA exam...again this time it was Maths and Stats but then things changed. I met a Teacher who really taught me the basics and made it very easy and interesting for me for me. The teacher was Dilip Oak and I sincerely wish, I had met him earlier in my life...my school years wouldn’t have been so bad.
mujhe 12th boards yaad dila diya tune :) I never understood why was calculus so important in life....integral or differential who cared. You are right I think it has a lot to do with lack of good teachers in younger classes.
ReplyDeleteSee its a vicious circle, u dont understand, u dont pay attention and becoz u dont pay attention , u never get there. Plus in convent school, toppers were always the teacheers favourite's...so who really cares for other kids who are differently gifted.
DeleteBecause some kids will hopefully become engineers much needed for the development of the nation :)
ReplyDeleteUnderstandably but why harrass the lesser mortals who will not add to the development of nation;)
DeleteYou bring back old school memories. My hands would not get cold....my mind would go indifferently blank!! it had its own survival mechanism!! I feel we spend a lot of time learning abstract maths which i have never used even remotely in my life...read the pdf Training the Human Plant...book written by Luther Burbank ( chapter in Autobiography of a Yogi by Parahamansa Yogananda ) ..radical thoughts on how to bring up children.
ReplyDeleteThanks Nitul, I will check out the book.
ReplyDeleteNice post. Just like you Math was my enemy:-). In college days my balance sheet never tallied :-).
ReplyDeleteThank you Mohana, thankfully I just abt managed that. I am telling you God ws overseeing me else..I cudnt have answered any problems...
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