FAILING ? A CHANCE TO RE-EVALUATE || CREATIVENONFICTION #22

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For some people, failure is not an option. For others, failure is not the end but for me, failure is a chance to reevaluate myself and come back stronger with better reasoning, as there is always room for improvement.

Nobody is perfect, at some point we have to try out something again and again before we are good at it and like they say;

Practice makes perfect.

I remembered when I was in secondary school and I failed my maths test. I attended a public school and I had problems with mathematics. When I was in primary school, my performance in mathematics was around average and I did well in my First School Leaving Certificate Examination.

When I got to secondary school, due to family issues I was moved to a public school. The first mathematics teacher I had was a female, she tried to groom us in mathematics, and due to my previous knowledge while in primary school I was able to cope with mathematics.

As we move to the next class, my mathematics teacher got pregnant and had to take maternity leave so another teacher had to substitute for her. He is a male teacher and the saying that;

"Mathematics teachers are mostly harsh is the real definition of this man".

He wasn't taking it easy with us as he doesn't teach us to our level. I can't say if it's because he teaches the senior science students that make him talk very fast or something else. He comes to class with a very long cane that merely seeing the cane, all that you want to learn for the day will just vanish even before he teaches it. That made me fear him and subsequently, I began having hatred for the subject.

When he gave us our first test, I failed woefully which prompted him to give another which I also failed. I was afraid to show my parents the test scores as my mum has made it clear that there was no room for failure.

Most times, I get a textbook and follow the examples in it to try to understand and whenever I manage to understand some part and this maths teacher teaches that same thing, I don't know how I will not understand it again. Most of us in the class had the same issue, we don't know what to do as we can't report him. But when I couldn't take it anymore, I summoned the courage and told our class perfect to meet with the Principal and explain our situation.

We weren't sure how the situation will turn out, as we feared he might flog the hell out of us for reporting him to the principal, then again, we thought about improving our learning, and we were willing to give it a try. This is not that we were reporting our maths teacher to the principal, we were only soliciting help out of our dilemma and I think that was our saving grace.

After the complaint, we noticed he stopped bringing the cane to class and he managed to take it one step at a time unlike previously where he can skip 5 steps and just arrive at the answer. It was more like starting all over for me as I doubled my effort though I was still scared to meet him for questions because he kind of has this "menacing look". Thankfully, I gave my all to get back on my feet in mathematics.

I studied and practiced, and almost all the books in my room has calculations on them as I constantly needed to jot down some things. After some time, he gave us another test and I passed it. I mean I solved everything and got all answers correctly. How amazing that was.

When I got my result, I was so happy and that motivated me to keep trying more and more till I finished secondary school. Mathematics became my best subject and I also went ahead to study mathematics in higher institution.

Looking back, I am glad I never let that failure pull me down instead it woke me up.

Thanks for reading.