In first grade, I was a math genius, at least for the first couple of months when all we had to deal with was single digit addition. I could race through a math worksheet in no time flat, reliably getting them handed back to me with smiley faces and stars. Think of it: a 6 year old mathematical prodigy!
The fun stopped abruptly and painfully. I was baffled that we had been working so diligently on “adding to” and now we were “taking away”. Why would anyone want less via subtraction when there was a plentiful supply via addition? Suddenly there was this thing called “subtraction” and I was dead meat in the water. No more smiley faces or stars on my work, just a lot of angry “X’s”. My mom tried working with me at home, using household things. “10 walnuts, but I take away 4. How many walnuts are left?” Clearly still 10 because all you did was move the walnuts to the other side of the table, THEY ARE RIGHT THERE, LADY! It just made no sense at all to me.
Of course it just got increasingly over time. So many hours with hideous multiplication flash cards. I mainly relied on the hope and guess method. I was fairly competent multiplying things by 2s, 5s (my favorite), 10s and 11s (once I learned the trick) but anything weird like 9s or 6s can make me clammy and uncomfortable to this day. And when those absolutely painful word problems started (If 2 trains leave the station…), I just shut down entirely.
It got worse and worse over the years. 3 tries to get through Geometry (and the only reason I passed was out of mercy on the part of the teacher; either that or he was very tired of seeing my face) and I tried to pay someone to take my math class in college. I’m not even sorry; I still think it was a great show of thinking outside the box and creative problem solving. But don’t do what I did. It’s wrong.
Driving in Reverse 