Not The World’s Situation, yet Heaven knows it should.
Rather I am talking about Mathematics; the subject I hated most in High School.
I have overcome these nightmares, but for a long while after graduating High School they stayed with me like a bad case of acne.
I did well in all my subjects – some even exceptionally well, but then there was Math. I couldn’t do it to save my soul.
Arithmetic in grade school was a breeze. In fact, the teachers would often look to me to ensure their addition, subtraction was correct. But when I entered Grade 9 – everything changed.
I had no idea why X+ Y = Z , in fact, I had no idea what X, Y and Z even were.
I remember preparing for a final exam and focusing on the X+Y=Z equation and feeling that at last I had wrestled it to the ground but received a zero for that portion of the test since the teacher had changed the XY and Z to AB and C. I was stymied.
I even had to take Math in grade 13 – they had such a grade back in my day – and in order to pass my year, I had to pass Math. My parents seeing the dilemma I was in, arranged for me to get tutoring in preparation for the final.
I still get chills from recalling the last math class; the teacher, a rather humorous-less soul by the name of O’Neil, asked several of us to go to the board whereupon he would read out a question and we were then expected to write down the answer on the Board. The question was given and everyone but me busied themselves with projecting their answers; I stood dumbfounded.
O’Neil soon noticed and asked me one simple question – “What have we been studying all year”?
“Give me a hint”, I shot back.
With a look of incredulity, he boomed out “Tangents” as if that would miraculously open the door to some great fountain of knowledge.
It didn’t.
I think if my math classmates were polled that day they would have unanimously voted me the most likeliest to fail at even trying out for unemployment.
But I wrote the final and ….passed. It was a cross Province Test, in the era of the New Math and apparently there were others out across Ontario who were mathematically challenged like me.
Needless-to-say, I never studied Math again but appreciate those for whom it comes easy.
As I see it…
‘K.D. Galagher’
