Let's talk about Math. When I'm in Math Class, every single thing that is said to me by the teacher/professor (no matter who it is) will literally go in one ear and out the other. My brain consumes little to none of material that I'm supposed to retain in my mind. And don't give me that whole "You Should Apply For Tutoring" schtick because quite frankly, I've been through it all. I've had After-school tutoring, Saturday school tutoring, I've even taken tutoring classes as a filler class in High School. (For those of you who are unfamiliar, a "filler class" is basically a class the school just gives you which isn't worth any credit and it takes up the same period of time that an actual class would take. In college, its referred to as a remedial class). This isn't some self-fulfilling prophecy of me saying"I'm gonna fail Math" and then I eventually end up failing or getting a seriously low grade (a D or a 65) from the instructor. I WANT to master this subject! 'Arithmetic Mathematics' past the Elementary School level and into the Junior High School level is a language that I know deep down inside of me, I will never, ever comprehend. In this blog, if you choose to read it, specifically describes my 10 ½ year oral history of applying myself to Math class. Straight from the community college student that I currently am as I type this, on my never-ending conflict with Math starting from the 3rd Grade all the way up to High School's Senior Year. Even though it'll take me some time for me to gather these ancient memories, it's pretty hard for someone to forget something that's been haunting their ass consistently for over a decade. You'll also hear about a shameful event that happened to me in High School where a teacher sneakily and successfully corrupted my decent but not perfect GPA just because I didn't attend her non-mandatory Saturday school tutoring. This is just another day, in my life*.
(*Lyric from "Just Another Day" by John Cena and Tha Trademarc)
Kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade made Math seem like the easiest subject in the entire freakin world. Adding, Subtracting and coloring in Bar Graphs were literally all we did in those years. I seriously thought that this was how Math would always be as I got older. Then the 3rd grade happens and you get hit with Multiplication, Division, Word Problems, etc. Then the 4th and 5th grade shove fractions up your anus. Middle School introduces Pre-Algebra and then the shit hits the fan in High School where they teach you every mathematical situation under the sun. Ever since this 21 year old guy was 7 years old, Math has been a thorn in my imaginary paw. I've never felt more stupidly confused in my life than in the 3rd grade. I say that because in the years prior to that, I was a wizard of knowledge! I had as much efficiency in my schoolwork and homework between kindergarten and the 2nd grade as any of the smart kids in my class. And now I'm in classes where 90-95% of my fellow classmates actually understand the material while I'm the confused dumbass in the corner of the room. So for the 1st time ever, I enrolled in Afterschool.
3rd Grade: It was meh. Just one of those after-school programs where they'd let us play games and watch movies but if we got too wild and crazy, then they'd start tutoring us with Math and other subjects. So that was a total waste of time and tax dollars.
4th and 5th Grade: I applied to be in an actual after-school. 2 hours a day for 2 days a week. Tuesdays were for Math and Thursdays were for Science. The added bonus was that our own Math teacher was our tutor. So the dude didn't have to go through that name remembering process. When it came to the State Test in June, I sucked... but not enough to fail and be denied my Public School diploma! To this day, I remember them accidentally giving us the 5th grade state test while we were in the 4th grade and none of us students pointed it out (on purpose) until about 20 minutes in to the period. Then it took them another 10 minutes to replace them with the 4th grade exams.
6th Grade: Marked the first time my feet have ever entered inside of a school on a Saturday. One of the worst mental experiences ever. Goodbye to sleeping in on Saturday mornings or waking up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons. It was gone, all fucking gone because my genetics aren't descended from Albert Einstein and my mom signing me up for 3 hour Saturday school sessions. The teachers were people I'd never seen in my life, the lunch tasted like defrosted dog crap, and it overall just felt like you were being punished for committing a felony.
- I also remember that year, our math teacher (Ms. Abraham) giving us a lyric sheet of Usher's "Confessions" but she rearranged the lyrics to terms relating to PEMDAS (Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition and Subtraction) aka the Order of Operations. I really wish I still had that lyric sheet because it was a legitimately catchy remix of a popular hit song. Ms. Abraham should have her own mixtape.
7th Grade: Platform Learning. As a part of then President George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" thing, our school was introduced with a new standard in the Afterschool initiative called "Platform Learning". It's basically a program that bribes kids into signing up for Afterschool by offering prizes for the amount of times you attended it every week. You got a certain number of points for every time you attended. At the end of the year, you'd receive the prize you wanted that equaled to the amount of points you had. Oh boy did I wish that were true. It was your standard small group Afterschool program where they lectured you in Math along with other subjects that I didn't need tutoring in but I had to attend because I needed those points. I wanted the iPod Classic that could only be awarded to the students with Perfect Attendance. So at the last session of the year, practically everyone in class, including me, were on the edge of our seats waiting to receive our iPods. And then we get the bad news (cue: Bad News Barrett - "I'm Afraid I've Got Some Bad News") that for some strange reason, the majority of the prizes in the catalog weren't shipped to the school. So as a regretful side prize, they gave every guy a Basketball (still inside the box), and every girl small Pink Boombox. I felt like giving those all Platform Learning fuckers a kick in the...
8th Grade: I had the incredibly lazy yet smart idea to just be involved in a small group Afterschool tutoring session ONCE A WEEK on the few weeks leading up to the State exam as opposed to an all year tutoring program. And for the first time since the 3rd grade, the teacher's lecturing stayed in my brain instead of passing through it. I ended up getting an increasingly higher score on that year's state exam compared to the 7th grade one. After that shining point in my educational life, I unfortunately made my unwanted return to sucking at anything relating to Math. And you can all thank the daily lectures filled with low-self esteem brought to me by Ms. Matos.
9th Grade: You know, I could write a whole separate blog about my past with Ms. Matos. It's a student-teacher experience that I've never had, never wanted, and thankfully never relived with any other teacher at the time of this writing. It's one you should be grateful to never have been through. If I need a reason to feel annoyed, I'll think of any moment I've had with her in 4 years of High School and there you go.
It's the first day of High School on my Freshman year. Math is the first class on my schedule. The class has started and the majority of students are in class learning at the time of my late arrival to Ms. Matos' Algebra class from H-E-Double Hockey Sticks. From day 1, DAY DAMN ONE, all she had to do was look in the exact center of my retina to know how completely hopelessly stupid I would be at this subject. The week before Thanksgiving of 2007 is when she started her Saturday school program. I've had my Saturday school experiences before but it was more of the culture shock of being in school on a Saturday morning that had me angry more than anything else. In this case, it was the solely just the instructor standing in the front of the classroom that pissed me the FUCK OFF. I really don't want to get in to specifics out of respect for her as a person, but if you know how RED I'm getting just writing this all this down, you'd know how hard it was to hold my insults. 2 months go by, I take the Algebra Regents, and I bomb as expected. So I'm re-admitted to her Saturday school program for the remainder of the year, I take the Regents again and I fail again. Keep this in mind, while all of this was going on, she was my everyday teacher aside from being my Saturday school tutor, and for some reason she never once gave me a failing grade during that entire year. She just kept on passing me with a 65 which is the lowest passing grade I could receive. I thought that she just had pity on me while all of this was going on but on the last day of school I figured out that she came to the realization that had she failed me in any quarter of the semester, I would've had to register for Summer School. On that day, I was notified by some of my peers that she was looking for me for that very reason. She aggressively started handing out Summer School slips left and right. How could she just force me into Summer School when she never failed me at any time between September and June? I remember it being a half day and as soon as my final class was over and I was the first motherfucker out of school just bolting home as fast as I could. I was so paranoid that she would just call my house and notify me or my mom from the phone but she didn't. I had a math-free Summer and I couldn't be happier. Too bad I can't say the same about Summer 2009 (tenth grade).
10th Grade: I swear I thought I was gonna be stuck with Matos as a Math teacher for all 4 years of High School. I remember that being my main fear going into the first day of school more than the general pressure of school itself. She was the "10 Month Itch" that I could never scratch off. You should've seen the sigh of relief on my face when I first looked at my program and discovered that I did not have Ms. Matos as a Math teacher. Hallelujah!!! I didn't even have Algebra which (should've) meant that even though I failed the Algebra Regents exam, I had no reason to study the subject again until Senior year. For this year I had Geometry with Mr. McMahon and Mr. Lewis. They were 2 of the most down to earth Math teachers I ever had. Even when I'd really bomb a quiz, McMahon was cool enough to add enough extra credit to give me a grade in the low 60's which I couldn't be more satisfied with because it meant I decently passed. Tutoring was offered by Lewis. He'd always mention that he's available after-school every day of the week and that he'd go over any of the problems we had. I was definitely a candidate for many of those tutoring sessions yet I didn't attend any of them. The 1 thing that separated Lewis and Matos is that Lewis didn't force anyone to do anything. He'd be delighted to even have one person attend after-school tutoring and even though he'd would sometimes tell us how frustrated he was if no one attended after McMahon would tell us that our overall grade point standing were low, HE NEVER FORCED ANYONE FORCED ANYONE TO DO ANYTHING THAT THEY DIDN'T WANT TO DO! If I didn't go to after-school, I was never, ever reprimanded for it. I thought 10th grade would be a pretty chill school year. I thought that and I thought wrong. Matos with her "Bounty Hunter" sense caught me in the hallway after-school one day and without the slightest bit of hesitation, gave me a death stare, took her cellphone out, and told me to give her my phone number. It was to call my mom to ask her permission to attend her fucking Saturday school class for another semester. I must of done something fucked up in a previous life to not only have to deal with her bullshit again, but to be forced into a Saturday school class when #1 I wasn't taking the subject
and #2. I was not required to take the test that she was preparing us until SENIOR YEAR!!!
Do you understand how it feels to spend 4 and a half months of your life learning a subject that you wouldn't be told to take the Cumulative State Exam for another 2 years? The agony of waking up at 7 am to go to school on a Saturday morning to study for a test that would not apply to me for 2 years!! Looking back at it now, I should've attempted to report her to the proper authority. Possibly the NY Board of Ed because this was some really stupid fucking bullshit. But thank you goodness gracious, between January and June, I played hide and seek with that woman to ensure I wouldn't deal with her again. That year I ended up "passing" the Geometry exam with a 60. I guess there was some rule about the year I entered High School at that time and for the rest of my time in High School, a passing grade in a Regents exam would be a 55 or higher. So I was happy but also surprised that I earned a grade on a state Math test so high. I thought I'd have another smooth sailing Summer vacation. That was until I was smacked by the worst stench of bullshit, horseshit, dogshit and any other animal that is known for crapping handfuls of shit, in the 16 years of me being alive. On the last day of school, as I was headed out the building, I unfortunately ran into Matos who gave me another "Hallway Death Stare" and told me to go to the guidance counselors office to pick up my report card. Normally, my homeroom teacher would inform me to do this, so it was extra weird that this woman who hasn't been my legit teacher in a year is telling me to do this. So I head into the guidance counselor's office and as I'm being handed my report card, I'm being told that I failed Algebra. I look at my report card and I received a failing grade in (get this) Saturday School because I didn't attend it for the 2nd half of the year.
WHO FAILS A TUTORING SESSION? WHO IN THE FLYING FUCK FAILS A MOTHERFUCKING TUTORING CLASS THAT IS STATISTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO FUCKIN BE GRADED FOR? THE WHOLE REASON YOU'RE IN THAT CLASS IS SO THAT YOU DON'T FAIL THE ACTUAL CLASS AND ITS ACCOMPANYING STATE TEST.
I didn't even have to ask around to come to the conclusion that Matos with her evil death stare, forced my "guidance" counselor to put a pretend class on my report card for the sole reason of failing me (and possibly some other students) so we could attend her Summer School class. If the NYC Board of Ed is reading this, I'd be totally fine with opening up an investigation of an event that happened in 2009 because this woman needs to be stripped of her teaching license ASAP. The only saving grace through all of this is that she didn't teach the Summer School class I was involved in.
- On a side-note I just want to say that between September 2007 and June 2011, I had an enjoyable High School experience. The events I'm describing are true but they do not apply to my entire my High School in general or any of the staff members that I have not mentioned in this blog. I made friends, a lot of the teachers saw me as being an efficient student of theirs, and I didn't have any form of physical or verbal arguments with anyone. The one and only constant in those 4 years that made me legitimately want to transfer to any other school was Ms. Matos' breathing down my neck when the majority of those times she had no business doing so. She was the bully you wanted to avoid as an incoming Freshman but remained to be that same person for all those years. I've never felt so endlessly furious than the times where she'd come in contact me in any way, shape or form within that building. If Ms. Matos didn't teach at there, my High School psyche would've been unblemished and I'd probably appreciate Math just a little bit better.
11th Grade: Another grade and another year with the same obsessed Math teacher grabbing me by the Belt Loops and forcing me into her Math class. The bullshit that occured this semester is that she actually went to that same guidance counselor and had me taken out of 1st period US History tutoring and put into her 1st period Algebra tutoring (without even informing my US History teacher). So there goes another 4 months of my life to be involved in a class that once again does not 1. have a cumulative grade to give the students involved and 2. does not end in a cumulative Regents exam. January 2010 just happened to be the 1st time and only time in High School that I didn't take any cumulative Math exams. The actual graded Math class I had that year was something I never saw coming. It was some sort of intermediate Trigonometry type of class being taught by Ms. Maldonado (not related to me). I was familiar with Maldonado because she was my graphic calculator teacher during Freshman year. Being in this class felt so weird because my previous schools are used to putting me in lower regarded Math classes with a Collaborative Team Teaching requirement. This was an upper level Math class with one teacher. Even my own friends and former classmates who read my class schedule told me I was in the wrong class. But at the end of the day, I didn't give a fuck because even though I was in a class that I should've had no business in, I felt smarter than my former classmates and I tried my best to keep up with the pace of the class. I failed the first semester but passed the remaining ones with a 65. My saving grace that year is that the previous guidance counselor made her exit (for a reason I was never informed of), so our grade had a new guidance counselor named Ms. Headen and she didn't take shit from anyone! Student or Staff. Ms. Matos knew that and that's why after January, she (figuratively) was on the outside looking through the window and watching me deal with all of my High School matters without her interference. That included Summer School. I did have to go to Summer School that year but it wasn't because of Matos' intentions. My school just required me to take an online Math course called Plato Learning (now referred to as Edmentum) for a few weeks just to get my study on. I was actually OK with that and it turned out to be the least stressful Summer School experience of my life even though I still sucked at Math during and afterwards.
12th Grade: 12th grade literally continued the smooth sailing ride that was Summer School because of the fact that our Math teachers Mr. Lewis (again) and Mr. De la Cruz had us take that online Math course known as Plato for the first 4 months of school. I was Matos free for the opening 4 months of a school year for the 1st time in 4 years and I couldn't, just couldn't be more happier. No Matos and I had internet access during Math class. But as you've read for the last 3 years of High School, whenever something good happens, it doesn't last for long. In January 2011, I along with a few of my classmates were transferred from 5th period cumulative Math to 5th period Math Regents Prep with a teacher that you'd never expect to be your teacher. As a matter of fact, he was so knowledgeable about Math that he taught a separate Advanced Math class to a select number of Seniors. This person was also the principal of our entire School and his name is Mr. Morales. The guy definitely had the qualities of a strict Math teacher who didn't abuse the material to you. He taught us the ropes both as a class and individually. Something Matos obviously never learned in whatever school she got her teaching skills from. Plus he held his classes 4 days a week because he had his principal's meeting on Fridays which meant we had a 50 minute break to do whatever we wanted on that day every week. I do remember one instance where Matos used her tactics of Death Staring to put me in her Afterschool program and threatened to call my mom because she "still had her phone number on her phone". So my intimidated self entered in to her 2 hour after-school program... for 20 minutes. I manned up and snuck out of tutoring without getting caught and never entered back that whole year. No phone calls were made. I took the Regents exam for the last time and I can guess because of the fact that I have my High School diploma means that I passed it. For what shouldn't be the motivating reason to graduate High School, a motivating reason for me to graduate High School was that I wouldn't have to deal with Matos anymore in the educational field anymore. And as of this writing, I haven't.
I could write about Math at my current collegiate level but its totally different than the grade school system. Its an individual semester of your average Math for 4 months. There's not much of an experience I can discuss.
And that's that. The fact that I've written this large blog about my lackluster experiences in Math class since Fall 2001, should be more than enough of a reason to excuse me from any Math class that I would have to be on the roster of according to my curriculum. In this world there's people that suck at Math but with extra help in the form of tutoring, they can put enough effort on the big exam that they will eventually pass. And then there's me. I'm not skilled enough to be one of those people. It's not that I don't want to be skilled in Math because I desperately do so I can pass it and leave it in the past. But as you've just read, I've been to every Saturday school, Afterschool, and Tutoring session known to man with every tutor and teacher in the Bronx, NY. Every single time I've left their classroom, I've had a big question mark over my head. Having a question mark hovering over your head is just as bad as having a black cloud over your head but the difference being, that a black cloud = bad luck no matter what your intelligence level is and a question mark = you can go through 10 years of your life passing practically every class subject put in front of you but one. Throughout my life, I've been constantly told that it's very unusual for a student to be so proficient in English but to always be at the very bottom of your Math class. As if both subjects actually integrate with each other so much to the point where you can't be successful in schooling with one and not the other. I honestly feel that between Fall 2001 and Summer 2011, with an exception for Spring 2007, I benefited passing every one of those Math classes with the doubt coming from my teachers that I'd actually learned something. I know myself that I surely haven't. In short, I shouldn't be in anyone's Math class anymore because it'd be a complete waste of time for the professor who's being given the task of directing me to have a mastery of knowledge in any type of Math of the 3rd grade level and beyond. I just spent so much time recollecting memories on my experiences with Math that are more than a decade old. I seriously can't do that with any other subject.
To NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, the City University of New York and any other university system that wants to acquire me into their campus, it's your call. My academic record, your school wide GPA, and possibly a minor or major perception of both parties (you & I) by an even higher authority that has the power to terminate jobs if need be, depend on me not being required to be lectured in Mathematics anymore within a higher educational campus, indefinitely. And to put it in even shorter terms, unless some Professor wants to tarnish their scholarly integrity by pitying me a grade of a D-, then I really don't belong in any Math class in which an academic credit is on the line. I don't know how to plea any more than that without getting down on my knees & physically begging.
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