In a recent conversation, my brother asked, “How did you go from being average at math to being great? What changed?” I thought I would bring it up.
As a new student in my third year (J.S.S. 3), my first-term performance or “position,” as we called it, was 17th out of the 19 students in class. This is much worse than most things, but it didn’t bother me. Life went on as usual until the second term, when I got a 0 on a math test. Our math teacher didn’t think twice about drawing sad-looking eyes and ears on the big zero. When you got your graded test back then, you’d start asking everyone around you what their score was to compare it to yours. I couldn’t stand being asked what my score was, so I ran straight to my bed in the dorm and cried for as long as I could remember until I fell asleep. That night, I woke up hoping it had all been a bad dream, but alas, it hadn’t been a dream, and I was back to my misery. I had felt ashamed so profoundly that I didn’t have the confidence to join in group conversations with my colleagues.
Right there and then, I decided to compete with the top two students in the class, more as a form of retaliation. It happened to be a few days before the midterm break. I borrowed J.S.S. 1 and J.S.S. 2 math books from a classmate who, surprisingly, still had them in good shape. In the two-week break, I studied the whole thing, from topic to topic and concept to…
