For me, math is like breathing. When I look at math, the numbers arrange themselves in my head to make sense of the problem at hand sometimes I need to do a little more thinking, but often the numbers just come together after I work with them a little. I have always loved math, and algebra has always been my favorite. As with any student, some things are a little more challenging than others, but I usually manage to figure out what is going on without help. After reading the article Coping with Math Anxiety, I compared math and the actress’s stage fright to my performances. I am a musician, and I have been performing in concerts and recitals for as long as I can remember, so I learned to get over my stage fright. I turned it into a thrill, but I’m not afraid of it anymore, so I do that with everything I love, I keep my mind calm, and just push through. Music also helped me develop my love for math, because music IS math.
When I was younger, my grandmother helped me get used to math, and even to love math, by doing silly little multiplication charts with me every morning while I waited for the bus with her. We would sit there and fill out a table of the numbers 1-12 so that I would learn them and I would learn to love them. It took a long time for it to sink in, but eventually, I could do them all in my head and I loved it. I could help my friends, and people started looking to me for help My family has always taught me to love what I’m good at, and not to be afraid of it. Both of my parents, as well as my stepfather, play darts. I started to play 5 years ago when my mom gave me my deceased father’s darts.
That is a sport filled to the brim with math that must be done quickly and accurately in your head, so even the basic math that I used to have trouble with comes easy to me now. I’ve been called a nerd and a geek since high school, all because I loved math and was good at it That used to bother me, btlt then I stopped caring about what people thought of me, and just did what I love. A lot of the things that are stated in the article are frustrating to me because they don’t apply to me. It was always expressed to me in one way or another that math is supposed to be fun, and not a chore. I was taught that if you want to succeed, you can’t be afraid of what you want to accomplish, in any subject, but particularly math and music.
