Mathematics
Untitled by Ethan Broadbent
Mathematics by Emma Li
I never thought I could do it, and I finally did.
I was in fifth grade. The classroom is connected to the outside; it is wet and a little old and usually smells like rusty coins inside on rainy days. My classmates are usually chasing, laughing and interacting with each other, and the sound of the laughter almost covers the sound of the ringing bells. Nevertheless, when the math teacher came, the whole aura changed. It becomes quiet and calm and the sense of gap makes it even more obvious. He is a brand-new teacher in our school with a serious-looking face and fiendish expression. Everyone outside of the classroom has been discussing him in the first two weeks about how professional but bad tempered he is.
Me, as a downhearted child who seldom smiled and who failed almost every math test in the past four years, do not know how to confront the new math teacher. It even became a familiar experience for me, to fail the math test and attach a disappointed emotion to seeing my scores. I knew I lacked any ability to learn mathematics even though it is an important subject.
Nevertheless, life is full of surprises and sometimes we change because of small or naive reasons. I somehow find the new math teacher is very similar to my dad because they both have a strict looking face and my dad is such a serious person when dealing with my grades. He even cares about it more than his job although I was just an elementary school kid at that time. My dad was always a straight--A student in his school years, especially in his strongest area -- math. He was always especially angry with me when I failed the math test, so he usually pushed the pressure on me and I felt I was a really stupid person when my dad shouted at me, because I had tried to work on math, but it didn’t improve my math score when it came to tests. And I am not going to give the math teacher a chance like the way my dad educated me. After class, while everyone has been discussing the math teacher, I was imagining the math teacher shouted at me about the poor grade I got and talking to my parents via phone, then I whispered to myself that here comes a big thing, and I must study super hard so that I do not receive the same outcome of the math teacher as it was to my dad. And it changed my whole mindset later on.
I know there is a huge gap between math and my other courses, but this time I was surprised that I didn’t think that much because I was too scared the new math teacher would educate me like the way my dad did. Therefore, I decided to set other subjects aside and study really hard the best I can even though I have not succeeded before.
But who knows?
I turned my attention to the course “Mathematics”. Outside of school, I worked on practices and math problems related to the course, to improve my math. A few weeks later, we had a first-quarter test. I was nervous and excited because I wanted to see the results of a few weeks of self-training. I straightened my clothes, cleared my desk, and threw myself out of the world just to keep myself focused enough to prepare for the quarter test. The time came for the test. My hands were shaking, my heart was beating really fast, but I always checked myself before going to the next problem. A few days later, the math teacher had finished grading the tests. And then, he walked toward my desk slowly and rested himself on my desk. At that moment, I thought, this is the end of my life because I thought I must have gotten a poor grade again. However, this time is a different story. He raised his mouth up a little, clearing his throat as if he was going to have an important announcement. Nobody knew what he was going to say, until…...he said I am the only one that got a hundred percent, the full score, in this quarter test. “No way, he must be kidding”, I said to myselves. But then, he turned to a serious looking face again. Then, I know it might be true. My body was deadlocked on the chair, my heart was beating super fast as if I was having a heart attack, and hands were cold and sweating. Everyone in the class who knew me in the past few years were also surprised as well for my outstanding test grade, and unlike usual breaking times within periods, the classroom was abnormally silent this time at this moment, and I even remember one of the pencils had dropped in those 15 seconds of silence. That day was the best day in my life and was so impressive. I never thought I would be able to break through that wall for the rest of my life since 4 years of math testing failure, but the story changed and I changed.
After that brilliant moment, I became much more confident in myself, and finally put myself in the same stage as my peers. I cannot forget the moment when my math teacher announced my math score to everybody. It was thrilling. And now, I even decided to major in Mathematics, which is a turning point that I thought I would never be able to reach in my lifetime. It was also the moment that I think I can reach a certain level after my hard work, and it can be just anything.
There are so many difficulties in the competitive world right now. Sometimes our brain overreacts to the problems we might have in order to self-defence, sometimes we do not trust ourselves that we could do or reach things at a certain level, sometimes we do not believe the miracles will happen on ourselves. We hardly realize that we all can make such an impact to ourselves as long as you want to. Life is full of bottlenecks, and people who can break through it can dominate their life which is also the cause that separates people.
