Sunday Scribbling: I Just Don't Get It!!!

That's this week's prompt over at Sunday Scribblings.

I said it a thousand times in maths classes. "I don't get it... Do you get it? ... Why don't I get it?" I so badly wanted to get it, to understand why we would do this or that with this set of numbers in order to ... I would ask, and be offered a series of steps to follow, but not knowing quite why I was following the steps made it really hard for me to remember next time what I was meant to be doing. Not knowing the right questions to ask left me struggling right through secondary school, doomed always to taking the class with the lowest expectations, and even at the very end, JUST scraping my way through the course that would allow me to qualify for college entrance. (Maths is obligatory for everything here.) I'm not stupid. I could follow other subjects. I could make sense of things other people couldn't understand. But when it came to maths... not a hope.

Imagine my shock and dismay when I'd embarked on my first college course to discover that one of the foundation year subjects that I had to take would be maths. Then imagine my amazement when the lecturer proceeded to introduce every topic with a clear explanation of just when and where and why this mathematical procedure would be used. It made sense! And when it made sense, it was so much easier to remember, and to work with. I couldn't believe that all through secondary school, this was all that had been kept from me, all I'd needed in order to begin to make sense of maths.

And with that, numbers stopped being a source of fear for me. I ended up working for some years in accounting, and when I decided much later in life to study psychology, and my fellow students were getting into a sweat over the necessary statistics modules, I knew, whenever I heard those words "I don't get it!", or found myself thinking the same thing, I only needed to go discover just why we'd be doing something to help me grasp the logic of it.

I'll never be a mathematical genius. I will always have to struggle and reach to understand, but now I know that it is possible to get it, when I want to, and that feels good!
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Go find out what the other Sunday Scribblers don't get HERE