I hate math so I am definitely not going into that direction.

But let me explain why each time I hear subtract, to the power of, cos, algebra or Pythagoras my stomach turns, my vision becomes blurry and all I hear is gibberish.

Well this hate relationship with math started back in grade 2. Don’t get me wrong, I understood math and I liked it. Until our teacher gave us our first mathematical “speed test”. 3, 2, 1 GO! Anxiety started to stir in me and boil from the inside as the dreaded clock counted down 20sec. The numbers in front of me started to float around and 4 x 2 was impossible to do. My confidence in Math deteriorated more and more after each dreaded speed test.

Grade 3 came and I hated math. I came across this book called “Wiskunde gee my maag pyn”. This was probably not the right book to read at this time. My hatred for math grew more.

Finally my parents stepped in and decided that I needed extra math classes. I had a wonderful teacher who helped me like math again and I went from D to A really quickly. This boosted my confidence in math and I was able to walk into high school with no stress. Grade 8 passed, then grade 9 and I was doing okay. I still didn’t like math but I was passing.

Until grade 10…

I had the worst math teacher in the entire world. She was a wonderful person when she wasn’t teaching math. She was old, a granny with her first grandchild (she always had to show us pictures in class). She was very overweight and always wore a black leather jacket. You could see she dyed her own hair because it was always a very uneven auburn and her nails were always painted “old lady” red. She smoked. Alot. Every time we received our marked test papers they smelt of smoke and some had red wine stains. Her face was droopy and baggy from many years of smoking. So droopy you could only see her bottom yellow teeth and she always repeated the same phrase, “Is julle hêppy” before wiping away the equation she just wrote in chalk with her bare finger and then wiping it off on her clothes , leaving awful white hand marks all over herself.

The girls compared her with the snail in Monsters inc.

After two years of sitting in this teacher’s math class I decided to give up on math and move to math lit.

It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

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Haha maybe something good can come from this story for my website