In T-minus two weeks, I will have completed my third semester of college with a total of fourteen or fifteen credit hours completed. Next semester, I will be taking nine credit hours, including at least one math course; a course (besides public speaking) that I’ve been dreading since… well… forever. 

Logically, I know I’ll do just fine no matter what I do. Math isn’t hard for me to do. In fact, it comes quite naturally to me. But, my past keeps biting at my ankles and scaring me away from delving into my math prerequisites. 

I’ve been in therapy for my shitty school experiences since I was in kindergarten. I talked with therapists about my struggles in school while I was going through them. I endured many IEP and 504 meetings with my therapists and shitty teachers in the same room together. I’ve been through hours and hours of extra tutoring for math throughout K-12. Yet, I still barely got through my math classes most of the time. Worse, my bad experiences with math and science follow me to this day. 

It wasn’t that I was bad at math, per-se. I got most of the answers to the problems correct, and was often the first in my class to finish standardized math tests, which I almost always passed with the highest scores in the class. The problem was how I got my answers in the first place. 

Indeed, I do math very differently than how it’s usually taught. I’m a visual learner. I need pictures, diagrams, hands-on projects, and color-coded equations in order to be successful. But, in the classroom, I often encountered teachers who would punish me for using colored pencils, drawing pictures in the “show your work” sections, and failing to do the math the way they taught me. It didn’t matter if I got the right answers. Most of my teachers cared more about how I got to the right answers than the right answers themselves. 

I was often pulled aside by teachers to discuss my struggles with math. Or, more accurately, receive verbal rants from frustrated teachers about my “stubborn refusal” to do math the way they were teaching it. 

“Clearly, you know how to do math my way,” I recall my fourth or fifth grade teacher saying, “You just refuse to do it my way. Until you do math my way, you will continue to lose points on your assignments. Are we clear?”

I don’t remember how I responded to that. I do, however, remember feeling terrible about my ability to do math for the rest of that year. In fact, I recently found out from my mom that I first started to get sick from anxiety around that same time. Nobody could accuse me of faking my illness either, because I’d wake up in the mornings throwing up from anxiety. Or, I’d make it through my mornings, but would get sent home from school in the middle of the day due to me throwing up. Usually, these episodes of intense anxiety would happen just before math or science class, resulting in me having to finish my worksheets at home. 

I enjoyed working on schoolwork from home, though. Why? Because I had the freedom to do shit my way at home, instead of being interrupted by my frustrated math teacher each time she walked by my desk. Plus, I felt much safer at home, and therefore didn’t get sick so much. However, as badly as I wanted to, I couldn’t do school from home, because my parents lacked the money and the ability to teach me from home. 

On top of that, both of my parents agreed that it would be unhealthy for me to spend my life at home, even if I felt healthier and safer there (to be fair, they were right). So, off to school I went whenever I wasn’t sick (or, at least, once I had completely emptied my stomach into the trashcan). Every day I managed to get through a full day of school, I’d come home in tears. I’d spend the rest of my day in my bedroom sobbing. Once I ran out of tears to cry, I’d pace around the house like a caged tiger till I finally passed out from exhaustion, only to wake up the next day and go through the same exact shit. 

This cycle would repeat throughout the rest of elementary school, through middle school, and even into high school. With each passing year, I hated and feared math more and more. I internalized my frustrated teachers’ words more and more. It wasn’t just one or two teachers from one or two different schools. Up until I got too sick to attend school like a normal student, almost each math and science teacher I ended up with had something really upsetting to say to me about my ability to solve problems. They didn’t care that I got the right answers. They only cared that I did things their way. Then, they’d punish and chastise me for being unable to solve math and science problems their way. 

It was a viscous, viscous cycle.

Fast forward to today. I'm two weeks away from the end of my Fall 2022 semester. Next semester, I will be taking on at least one math prerequisite. I'm having to choose between three classes: college algebra, pre-calculus, or statistics. All of them scare the shit out of me. 

It's not because I really believe that I am stupid and bad at math (I don't). Logically, I know that I'm actually really good at math and science related subjects. It's just that I've encountered far too many teachers who believed otherwise; who would call me "slow" and "stupid" to my face, and would present my worksheets to the entire class as examples of "what not to do" (my sixth grade math teacher was particularly fond of that).

All those years of being degraded and put down by my own damn teachers, is the main reason why I question my intelligence so much today.