I had a high school math teacher who was…brown (not his skin tone, but all his clothes were brown). When he talked, spit would pile up in the corner of his mouth. He talked in a monotone. He is the personification of Math to me. A little horrifying. Something that I can’t really relate to. Something devoid of fun and color and anything exciting. Something I had to pay attention to, but it hurt to do so. Something that made my brain want to go far away.
I am in awe of true math geeks. The people who like math. Who get math. Who aren’t afraid of big scary numbers, with even scarier formulas. That is not/was not me.
I always had to work so much harder in my math classes. It never came naturally to me. But I also wouldn’t let it defeat me. My brown teacher was my geometry teacher. Geometry and my brain really did not click. I don’t think in spacial relations terms. I definitely don’t think in terms of squares and triangles (I am more of a spiral girl). And there weren’t even any stories I could make up for Geometry (I used to make up stories for algebra formulas to make them make sense in my head).
Geometry was also the only class I ever received a progress report for doing poorly in, because I had a D average. I could not show that to my parents…I wasn’t someone who got progress reports. So, I waited my teacher out, figuring correctly that he would forget I hadn’t turned it in. And then proceeded to work my butt off and brought my grade to a B+ by the end of the semester.
I avoided math in college, until I really couldn’t put off any longer the fact that I needed to complete some kind of math course. So, I took logic — English major math. That class was one of the hardest classes I have ever taken. It did not make sense to me. At all. Again, halfway through the semester, I had received several failing or close to failing grades. I was not about to let a MATH class wreck my GPA, so I studied. And studied. I did every problem in my textbook. And I literally mean I did every practice problem that was in the book. I would do the problems until they made sense. And then I would do them again the following day, to make sure they still made sense.
I walked out of that class with an A. It was my hardest earned A.
Me vs. Math. I won — but it was a very hard battle.
Check out SheHangsBrightly and Savannah Faith for their views on Math 
