Introduction

Till now, whenever I see mathematics subject, my heart usually skips because that subject has really dealt with me. I really don’t know why most time I find it hard to grab it. Sometimes, when I think I’ve finally gotten the explanation, the lecturer will now set a questions with a little twist to cause more confusion for us. But those who know maths very well, even when they twist the question, they still know how to answer it to get the right answers.

Well, before I go ahead, to touch on some of the questions required from us, I’ll love to invite @joshwolfman, @sirexcellence01 and @tripplem for the contest.

How good were you at math? Was it difficult for you to learn them?

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When it comes to maths, I thought I was average student back in secondary school, until I was introduced to further maths, I finally accepted I don’t know shit in mathematics. I really don’t know if it’s just me or my fear for the subject, it seems all the maths teachers are always very wicked. In fact, Back in high school, whenever the numbers becomes too plenty on the board, I start getting confused. The maths teachers sometimes don’t help matters. They expect everyone to catch up or understand all they are teaching at the same time. Forgetting that the capacity it will take for some students to absorb things are quite different. If you don’t get a particular point clearly and you keep asking them too much questions on it, they feel you’re dragging them back and get frustrated.

You can’t blame them either. Each teacher have a limited time on their hands and they want to make sure they cover a certain amount of topics during that time frame. So asking them too much questions on something they expect you to grab fast is annoying. That’s why most times, if I don’t understand a topic, I just let it slide. In fact, maths was the only subject I hardly prepare for during examination because I don’t even know what I wrote there and how I arrived at the answer. The highest I can do is to meet those maths guru in class to help me with some revision on maths, let it not look as if I submitted blank sheet on exam day!!

Share an anecdote while you were studying this area of ​​knowledge

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Now that I’m all grown up and I’ve started helping my nephew and niece do there maths assignments, I grab the explanation so fast and I wonder why I wasn’t doing so well in secondary school. But there is this one time in high school that I actually did very well in maths but they had to rewrite it again, I was so angry. Well, I cheated. The maths teacher exam paper mistakenly leaked to our class. But we decided to keep it amongst the set of people who don’t know maths and we refuse to share it with maths gurus in class. That was my first time in a long while I was preparing for maths examination. Surprisingly everything I was learning that day was just perfect. I can’t tell if it was the desperation to succeed that made it easier for me to understand the solutions very fast.

On the exam day, those of us who use to fail maths in class, did exceptionally. Scored very high grades while the maths gurus though they didn’t fail, but their scores was way lower than ours. The maths teacher knew something was fishy and had to cancel the exams. We tried to protest but it didn’t work. In the end, we wrote the maths again and as usual, we went to our normal grade. To read the full story, you can go “here”.

Do you remember any topic that was easy for you to understand? Which was the most complicated?

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As long as it is outside the scope of the normal plus, minus, multiplication and division, I find it difficult. It took a special lesson teacher to teach me mathematics till I understood it very well and it was in preparation for my WAEC exams and also because my dad had promised me a video game. I started catching up gradually in maths.

My hardest subjects in maths was all of them but I hated that “longitude and latitude”. I wonder we keep calculating every time in an equator. Another very difficult one was “quadratic equations” where they will say:

If A=6 and B = 4
Find C=?

Sometimes I ask myself, what the heck is my business with “C”, if it’s missing, I really don’t care, as long as I’ve “A and B” with me, “C” can keep missing for all I care..🤪

What do you think is the importance of mathematics in everyday life?

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• As we grow older, we start seeing the importance of everyday maths in our life. Back in school, I use to ask our maths teachers that some of this topic they teach us, it’s irrelevant but I was very surprised when I went to learn sewing, I discovered that to get a perfect neck cutting , you need to apply the formula for circumference of a circle. I never believed it.

• Even in operation of crane machines. As a crane operator, when calculating boom radius, boom length and boom height, you need to have knowledge of circumference of a circle and know right angle, triangle formula (SOH, CAH, TOA) very well. I know it’s shocking, same way I was shocked as well.

• Even in movies, especially war movies. Whenever people want to give directions, you hear “longitude and latitude”. You also here kilometers and meters.

• How about our everyday buying and selling as a business man and woman. You need to know the basic arithmetic maths to succeed in order not to be cheated.

• Accountants, engineers, doctors etc these and many more have a lot to do with maths in their day to day operations to succeed.

Conclusion

We can’t do without maths no matter how much we avoid it. The best we can do is just take out time on your own to learn it and embrace it because maths will always find you, you can’t hide from it