My relationship with Mathematics

All students has their academic strength and weaknesses. My academic strengths is history and ELA for it saved me many times as well as revealing certain life interest, skills and passions. But a weakness that I once believed was I strength was math. Growing up, I watched TV shows for kids that taught viewers basic ways to count. This made me intrigued in the subject because I believed I was good at counting. I learned basic math skills at a young age. At 3rd grade, I mastered basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I felt complete until 5th grade not only gave me a painful reality check but foreshadowed massive gaps in my knowledge that would lead to multiple downfalls. I once thought I was complete until I saw things like fractions and mixed numbers and how to solve them. It made me feel stupid. I eventually mastered it so I still had hope I could do well in the subject until 6th-8th grade put my hopes in the morgue. Not only was the introduction to things like exponents, long division, and square roots hard enough, but my relationship with my math teacher was extremely fickle. When I would seek assistance, I would be met with ridicule. When I failed to meet work expectations, my parents would be notified and I would be scolded. I failed math class for 3 years in a row thus my enthusiasm in math to deteriorate as a whole. I grew so numb to the subject that I didn’t care if I failed. This barely changed when I transitioned to high school. In fact, it probably grew worse because I went from being numb to rebelling as I began arguing certain math subjects were useless for most people. Algebra was one of them for I found it my biggest pet peeve. Eventually, you understand to just give in and try your best to simply get the hell out. For me, I unfortunately completed this partially due to being in remedial math class in college. Tough luck…