By fourth grade I was already crashing and burning. Almost every student in my class was moving ahead in subjects that I seemed to be understanding less and less by the day. If education were a race where we all started at the same time; than I was quickly becoming the guy falling into last place. Truthfully, math was the beginning of the end for me. Even now, the feeling I get trying to solve simple math problems is one of frustration and embarrassment.
I feel like I’m hitting a mental wall. Try to imagine your mind pushing past a barrier that you could not breakthrough regardless of how hard you tried. Sort of like trying to understand someone speaking to you in a foreign language with almost no previous experience. When someone asked me to solve a problem involving long division, a deep-rooted sense of insecurity would overwhelm me. I would desperately try to understand where to begin; It was the feeling of hopelessness and it only grew over time. I slipped away from the rest of the herd around fractions and division.
It’s kind of funny actually; I literally began to fracture and divide from everyone else. Hephzibah Roskelly, a professor at the University of North Carolina¬-Greensboro explains the process of separation that mirrors my own: “By third or fourth grade … you and your fellow students were “tracked” by this point, grouped into classes according to the results of standardized achievement tests.” (175) I was regurgitated into the lowest levels of math in the hopes that something would stick, but it never did. I might have had ADD or a learning disability. It’s really all speculation at this point because it was never formally diagnosed. I wasn’t held back in school, but I never moved forward in math.
Don’t worry; t. .NH: Boynton/Cook, 2006. 209-217. Print.Freire, Paulo.
New York: Herder and Herder, 1970. Gourdine, Tracy “Seeing the Invisible.” American River College, January, 2005 Convocation Speech.Hibel, Jacob. George Farkas, and Paul L. Morgan.
“Who Is Placed into Special Education?” American Sociological Association 83.4 (2010): 312-32. Jstor.org. Web. 20 Nov.
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” The Subject Is Writing: Essays by Teachers and Students. Ed. Wendy Bishop and James Strickland. 4th ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2006. 219-226.
Print.Roskelly, Hephzibah. “The Cupped Hand and the Open Palm.” The Subject Is Writing: Essays by Teachers and Students. Ed. Wendy Bishop and James Strickland.
4th ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2006. 175-185. Print.
