How is it that old childhood fears never leave us ? ? ?
I used to be really bad at Math . . Barely scraped through the ICSE exams with 46 marks . .that too after many tuitions & prayers to God by my parents I’m sure .
I took pride in the fact that I got 46 marks ! That was 11 marks more than the passing grade & I was done with Math for life . . I had already planned that I would take up Arts in College & never ever do a sum again in my life . Good riddance to the bane of my life .
But,as they say Man proposes & God disposes !
I got by without doing any Math throughout my college life but once I got married the onus of doing all the accounting,taxes,investment & banking became my duty . Partly because of my own obsession with organization & partly because my husband couldn’t be bothered with doing all these “clerical” duties as he called them !
I got along ok with all this”math work” till our daughter,Kiara grew up & started learning Math in school.I normally help her with homework & the minute Math was introduced into the curriculum my old fears returned ! I started doubting my ability to teach her & wondered if I would be able to continue for long . . . When should I get her the Math tuition teacher ?
Yet I somehow managed to get through the additions & subtractions OK. I even looked at multiplications & divisions in the eye & made mental math my friend.
Kiara also seemed to be doing pretty good in Math under my tutelage & I secretly kept thanking God that she wasn’t bad in Math like me. And,I have to admit that tackling Math as an adult wasn’t such a formidable task. Whilst teaching Kiara I had almost started feeling smug about the fact that actually I was good at Math, its just that I had never been taught properly & therefore developed a mental block against it, etc,etc . . .
That is until Geometry arrived !
One look at the different angles & the protractor & divider did me in . . All my new found love for Math vanished & I promptly told the husband that it was time he started teaching his daughter Math since he was soo good at it & I ran from the Geometry book .
But,Geometry was determined to not leave me alone. It taunted me me the the other day while I was reading a novel.One of the characters in it said he was “at the apex of an isosceles triangle ” and I was like what is that ? ? ?
That’s when I realised that if I had been teaching Kiara Geometry I would probably have known what it was . . So I have decided to conquer my fear of Geometry & I’ll be damned if I don’t ACUTEly know about every OBTUSE angle there ever was 🙂
So help me God ! ! !
