I’ve always been curious about why things are the way they are. Religion has done wonders in answering the branches of this question by explaining the unexplainable. However, some things are explainable, but they continue to be unexplained. My first encounter with this idea happened during the introduction of mathematics. I struggled with it a lot during my 3rd and 6th grade years. Numbers, formulas, sequences, ideas and concepts were never truly explained. We were always left in the dark when it came to these things. More or less, the way I learned, it was almost like a memory game. Just know when to do it, and how to do it. And you’ll be fine, they said. However, I didn’t feel that this was quite the right way to teach. As Walt Whitman once said in the book Song of Myself,
“You shall look at all sides and filter them for yourself.”
This is something very crucial to learning, and I believe I was missing out on it when I was learning.. Filtering ideas for yourself and understanding it in a way only you can understand. With no knowledge of how these ideas of mathematics came about, schools forced me to learn these types of things ONE way, and the ONE way shown by the teacher was irrefutably said to be the CORRECT way. That’s just how things went about when it came to mathematics. However, as I got to 7th and 8th grade, I utilized this understanding to better adapt myself into this disadvantage to make it into an advantage. This worked, my grades improved tremendously, but I came to this realization a bit too late. I was always frustrated before though. Was I just unable to do math well? Will I ever be able to pursue my dream if I’m unable to do even the simplest of math? I thought I was unbelievably dumb, but that was not true. I just got stuck in my own head. I was simply thinking too deeply about the problem, so from there on out, I thought superficially. This was how the schools of my past really wanted me to think. This, I would soon learn, was my biggest mistake, as it would take away the freedom that my thoughts had.