Hello, everyone.
I welcome you to my blog. Sometimes reminiscing on the good old days from kindergarten to high school when we had very little to worry about since we had our parents take care of everything we needed, most of the time the only problems I had were when I had a math test to write, a math classwork or a math assignment, and in a worse case scenario, the days when I could not find my school bag or socks; those days were my major problems, and they always left me thinking, sometimes even in tears, especially when I could not find my socks or school bag and my dad was waiting for me in the car. That pressure of running around and with teary eyes even blurring your vision the more 😂.
There are many students out there who fear mathematics, students who, if given the power, will scrap it out from school curriculum, and I was one of those students, but it was annoying how you cannot escape it because it is a general subject, and every general subject appears every day on the timetable. This means that you have to see the math teacher every day, and in most cases, math teachers are always brutal. This means that the day you fail to do his assignment, it is either you miss school or you get punished for failing to do the assignment, and some go as far as punishing students for doing the assignment but failing to get the right answer.
For some mathematics teachers, it is impossible to escape their punishment because if you don't do their assignment, a punishment awaits you, and if you do and don't get it right, a punishment still awaits, and if he in any way senses that you copied or got an elder brother or sister to do it for you, punishment awaits you too. I had a very brutal mathematics teacher, and that contributed to my hatred for mathematics. The only way you can be completely safe and not get punished is if you miss school, but if you want to do that, what do you tell your parents, and for how long will they believe it? So sometimes I just prepare my mind, and that way the punishment is not felt much.
My narrative about mathematics changed when my dad was posted to a new work station, and we all moved there with him, and I met a new mathematics teacher. Since it is believed that all mathematics teachers are brutal, I was seeing this mathematics teacher the same way, but he proved that he was different, and indeed not all mathematics teachers are the way we think. He was different; if you fail to do his assignment or classwork, he will ask why, and if your reason is valid enough, he spends time to talk to you, and if not, he frowns and gives you a stern warning.
He is the type that spends time explaining; if you get a classwork assignment right and are among the first five to submit, you get rewarded. Unlike my old mathematics teacher, who once he is in class, it feels like we are in a slave trade era, and if you talk when he did not ask you to, you are in trouble, when this new math teacher is in class, it is a completely friendly environment, one where a student is free to express themselves and calm his attention in areas where they don't understand, and he will go back and explain it again and again, and if you still don't get it, he will ask that you meet him in the staff room after class.
He started evening classes, and I enrolled though I never liked evening classes but he made it enjoyable, and over time I started to like the subject every student hated, and that is exactly how mathematics became my favorite subject from junior high school down till senior high school. Sometimes the teachers are the problem, and it is not always the student.
This your story is similar to mine except for me, I was just lazy when it came to maths until I decided to sit up. But then shout out to those teachers who made it possible for us to see these scary subjects in a different light.
Those teachers are the real heroes 💯.