Editorial»
An unfair mat(c)h
JAN 08 - The day my SLC exams ended,
my diary had to bear a five-
page entry. I happened to glance at these lines, “I don’t know what two plus two equals. And I don’t care either, it can be one or hundred as it desires to be.”
It made me laugh. And think back.
Until I was in the sixth standard, I was used to parroting everything, including math. But with the seventh, this became impossible. There were so many formulae and diagrams and the book itself was so thick – it really hurt when your teacher banged it on your head for a sum gone wrong.
Every single day, during the math period, I would get painfully helpless and jittery. Around this time, I happened to read that on average, people had more or less similar mathematical skills. This had me convinced that I was not average; I was simply a dunce.
At first, I did think that I was not doing enough. So I practiced – days and weeks and months and my whole year I spent adding and crossing and dividing and cursing – and in my final exam, I didn’t know the answer to a single sum of the question sheet.
To this day, I don’t remember what I did – I made up some answers, guessed others, left most of them and ended up with a forty. You might say this was my grand break-up with math. The next three years after, I did try my stubborn best to smoothen our relation. But my dreaded enemy always proved far more powerful.
But then, even though blinded with rage, I did know the power math lent you – the way it made you feel on top of the world if you got three sums right in a row, the way it fetched you marks, the way it gave you a ‘brainy’ tag. But much more obvious to me were its frequent pauses and full stops, the jerks and the lowly dumps. When I was given slam books to fill, I invariably ended up writing ‘Pythagoras’ in the “I hate” column. After this, I simply left struggling with math and resigned myself to my plight, promptly going and failing for the first time in my (short) life. I pulled through with grace marks in the send-up.
With barely a week left for my SLC, I sighed and scraped out my algebra book – and believe it or faint, read it through – because it was the only thing I could do. Then I wrote down everything I remembered. In the exams, I did that again – wrote things down, mostly in simple plain English (assuming the examiner to be as flabbergasted as I was by those knotty steps).
Incidentally, I came home crying on both my math days – and everyone thought I had failed. I did not fail, though – I got a decent above seventy score in both of them and jumped over the iron gate with a grin on my (tear-stained) face and a report card to boot.
And that’s how it all turned out. It seems too long past to bear any childish grudges against the subject now, but sometimes I wonder if it hasn’t scarred me for life. Most of my nightmares have math in them – the vulnerability, the lack of confidence, the scratchy doodles and teardrop tattoos. Math made me doubt myself as a student, a pupil, even a person. I still get so frustrated trying to handle money. And anyway, now, what is left of what I dinned into my head with such a lot of fuss and hassle? I don’t know what the radius of a pyramid is or even if it has a radius. I can’t recall theorem number one or the formula of a median. I just have this mental block against it all.
This is not just my story. There are hundreds and thousands who would be better off studying a language, or sociology or handicrafts or anything except this cold calculation. It is a crime to be forcing young minds to study something that will neither help them in life, nor add any sustainable knowledge. It may be the best subject for all those who can multiply and verify.
For the rest, it is but an unfair match.
Sealed with adequate apologies to the math-lovers.Posted on: 2004-01-08 02:12
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