An Underachieving Math Fiend

I saw a nightmare last night. It was so scary that I felt when I awoke as if I had fought a match with Mike Tyson while I was asleep. What was so frightening about the dream?

I was in a math class at my senior high school in Japan! And the teacher told me to solve a trigonometry question at the blackboard!

I went up to the black board and just stood still for a long time. I did not have a clue how to solve it. Then time was up. The teacher told me to go back to my seat.

Well, he did not scold me. No classmate laughed at me because the majority of them did not have a slightest idea what the hell they were studying. I felt their sympathy but I was filled with horror; it'd take me six years to finish three-year senior high school!

At age 37, I still see a lot nightmares about high school math classes. I know it very well that it is one of the biggest reasons of my low self-esteem.

At 15, I was sent to the best senior high school in my school district because my junior high average score was relatively high, boosted by excellent scores in Japanese literature, English, science and social studies. These subjects set off my miserable math score and made me a very bright student. Teachers were very willing to push me into the best senior high but they ignored that the school excessively emphasised the math classes!

My high school had eight math sessions a week. And I spent eight out of 33 hours every week just sitting with my mouth agape absolutely without an idea what the teacher was saying... I felt very miserable. But so did most of my classmates!

My mother was furious with my first mid-term math score there. I only scored 25 out of 100. But it was slightly higher than the class average of 24. Math teachers lamented aloud and gave us piles and piles of homework that we could barely handle... And we fiendishly studied math. Only math so that the teachers of other subjects lamented that they could not give any homework.

But the situation got worse. We continued sitting like a bunch of fools (some started sleeping) and continued scoring miserably. Sometimes the class average dived to a single digit out of 100! So the school shortened the summer vacation to mere five days and made students attend only math classes during summer. But the situation did not improve a bit. Our average score continued to crawl around 10 to 30 out of 100 like a worm.

Then were we really a bunch of math fools? Perhaps. But the math teachers finished the 10th grade math textbook in two weeks. And the 11th grade math textbooks before the end of our first year. They tried to build a magnificent skycraper of math without a foundation! They simply failed to teach us. They were like a surgeon who dares to say that the surgery was successful but the patient died...

Our math teachers had a grand ambition that all their students could apply for the science divisions of University of Tokyo, the most prestigious school in the country. That's the reason they made us low-achieving math fiends. Well, some of us did and a few were accepted. But mere five or six out of the school's 500 students went to UofT every year!

The fools were not the students but the teachers... There's nothing bad about being ambitious but using others as the tool to fulfill one's ambition is even evil.

And I now envy them as they did not have to take the slightest responsibility for the disastrous results of their poor jobs but could blame their students. What a job! If we behaved like this in the private business sector, we'd never keep our jobs beyond the probation periods! (Well, it seems that such people can keep their jobs regardless of their performance in some European countries, though...)

Now I've let some of steam out. I hope now I can fart less. But actually I am thinking about studying the entire high school math over again, slowly, taking a lot time this time so that I can console the part of me that suffered in the math classes.

(I want to console me very much because my poor math scores barred me from confessing my love to Ray, my boyish dream girl who was very good in math... Well, the students with high math scores could behave like aristocrats while the ones like me had to humble ourselves like serfs in our school!)