Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm just watching this Yo Samdy Sam video and already noticing (in spite of her posh, private school education - privilege alert!) that many of the teachers' observations are almost exaclty the same as on my own. Almost eerily, in fact, although I went to a very rough comprehensive in the North East of England. My reports were, on the face of it, rather good, but there are some little asides which indicate constant high levels of anxiety combined with my supposed "giftedness" (I was actually terrified into appearing "gifted", I now think). When I look back, I'm getting more of a feeling of, "My goodness - what did they do to me?" Very interesting, I think, And I'll probably reflect some more on this as I watch the rest. My "giftedness" didn't exactly carry over into most of the workplaces I got myself trapped in and I then experienced decades of anxiety and fairly poor mental health. So... and if you care to share, how was it for you? www.youtube.com/watch
Apologies if this is going a little off-topic... There was a Maths teacher at my secondary school who was (to put it politely) a bit of a character. To this day, I am convinced that he thought he was teaching a class full of university students. Toward the end of the 2nd year, there had been an exam. Not one person in the class scored higher than 30%. As his reaction was to scream at us that we should have been paying more attention, I think one can safely assume that it hadn't occurred to him to consider that maybe he needed to adapt the way he taught Maths.
Maths teachers and short tempers seem to go together in my mind. Or maybe those are the only ones I ever experienced or heard about and most are lovely.
I never had a grumpy maths teacher, and one was a teacher we liked. My A level maths teacher was hopeless though, poor chap. I felt sorry for him but he was not good at teaching at all, especially maths. He only taught maths for that one year, but sadly it was enough to ruin maths for me and I dropped that subject.
I still had 3 sciences, but annoyingly he was my physics teacher too! If I'd had a better maths teacher I wonder if I'd have actually liked it, it's only logic after all. Now I have a bit of a mental block with maths and numbers, though I don't know if I used to have number dyslexia back then or not. But then it tends to be the long strings of numbers which I struggle with, like bank numbers and mobile phone numbers - I could cope when they were mostly 6 digits with the first two being the same!
It's a wonder I passed physics A level using GCSE level maths. Part of it was my fault in a way, in that we had to do algebraic long division and it was so long since we had done long division at all that I had forgotten how to do it, since that was junior school and in 5 years of senior school we used calculators! But I was too embarrassed to admit I couldn't do this thing we had done in junior school that I just disengaged and stared out the window, doodled and wrote my notes as small as possible. Back then my eyes were sharp! I could squeeze 3 lines of tiny writing to a line of wide spaced and two to narrow spaced!
Sorry (a little bit) for the digression.