It’s funny to think that I actually used to be good at math.
Up until the eighth grade, I could look at a problem without wanting to burst into tears and blame myself for failing to conjure up the right equation, use the right methods, and administer flawless calculations in order to arrive at a single correct answer. But as high school came closer and the math got harder, I struggled with the idea of having to navigate the shores of math on my own in a more independent academic environment where so much more would be expected of me.
For the past three years, I have associated math with what I tend to see as my inability to think creatively and make connections between all the mathematical concepts I’m supposed to have mastered over the years. By some miracle, I’ve been able to scrape by most of my math classes with the IB-to-letter-grade equivalent of As and Bs. It’s only now at the end of the first semester of my junior year that I’ve experienced the peak of my mathematical failures, as far as my grades are concerned.
This may or may not be coming from the core of my mathematical anxieties. But even if I haven’t even seen my first semester report card yet, I’m 80% sure that my grades are less than ideal in the context of everything I’ve been working towards in my first two years of high school.
Think of the behaviors commonly associated with failure. You name it; I’ve probably done all of them as a result of the mere idea of getting a bad math grade. Slamming my math notebook onto the floor in frustration? Check. Putting off studying for fear of not understanding anything? Check. Having my mind go blank during finals? Check. Crying in fetal position as soon as I got home after the exam? Check. But all this had to end somewhere.
It took at least three days for me to figure out that maybe the problem wasn’t that I was unable to do math. All the studying I’d done had proved otherwise. I understood almost every single note I had taken down from all the math classes that I never skipped once since the beginning of the school year. After reviewing formulas, rules, and identities, I went straight to answering the challenging practice problems in my textbook and past IB papers off the Internet. And yet for some reason, I still could not answer the tests administered by my math teacher.
I was so set on acing my midyear exam and yet my expectations did not hold true. Regret was all I could think of upon leaving the exam room after having barely answered the 15 complex questions on the exam paper. Why didn’t I study hard enough? Why doesn’t anything work no matter how hard I try? Why is this so hard? Will a low Math SL grade make any of my successes in other subjects less substantial?
I was deeply confused by the idea that no matter how hard I worked or studied; I was still getting the same barely passing grades not worthy of anyone’s refrigerator door. While it was so easy to indulge in these thoughts, I had to put a stop to this kind of thinking. Associating failure with regret is part and parcel of cultivating a “fixed” mindset rather than a “growth” one, and until now I’m certain that the latter is what I definitely needed to work on if I really want to get better at math this second semester.
I still have my doubts as to why it had to take this long for me to realize that, for me at least, good math scores are not a result of rigorous studying even a week before an exam. I figured that if I really want to ace this class next semester, I’ll have to go through everything from functions, exponentials, logarithms, and trigonometry every single day if I really want to ingrain an entire chunk of first semester math into my brain. I also need to remember that graded or not, every single assigned worksheet must be answered completely and thoroughly in order to avoid a stress-inducing study session taking place from a few days to a week before any math exam. Although these things are easier said than done, I genuinely hope I’m getting there and will have something mathematical to be proud of come the end of my junior year.
When failure strikes, there’s really no time to blame others and even yourself for anything that might have happened. I could take the easy way out by ceasing to work and just blaming everything on my math teacher in accordance with the psychology concept of “self-serving bias.” (If anything, at least this shows I’m doing well in all my other subjects.) I could even cave in to all the anxiety and regret induced by the mere idea of getting a bad math grade and switch to the much easier IB class of Math Studies. Yet I’ve made my decision to do it the hard way and commit to working as hard as I can. Not just to bump up my grade, but also to face my fears and find a way to really appreciate math while learning the ins and outs of everything a Math SL student is supposed to know.
There’s nothing I can do about what I might have done wrong in the first semester of my junior year. In fact, instead of obsessing over what might be a bad math grade, I should be proud of myself for excelling in every other class I committed to this year. It’s so easy for me to let my thoughts go through a cycle of regret, frustration, anxiety, and shame. And yet I need to be strong enough to recognize that this is something I can achieve on my own and that any triumph concerning the matter will be a big one, regardless of how easy or insignificant these challenges may seem to others.
Unless I actually sit down and get to work, there’s no certainty that I’ll have something to be proud of at the end of my junior year. But at the end of the second semester, I promise that I will not be writing about how I failed and about how I regret not having done enough to excel and finally overcome my fear of math.
In some ways, my failures have taught me a lot more than any of my successes ever have.
