I Always Thought I Was Bad At Maths
The way false beliefs can stay with us for a long time
I didn’t like maths when I was in Senior School. I always thought I wasn’t that good at it. I was shocked when I got my GCSE result. I stared at the A, wondering if perhaps they had made a mistake and mixed my test paper up with someone else’s.
It’s funny how we always find ways to confirm the beliefs we have about ourselves. I later reasoned I must have just been lucky and got ‘good questions’. It felt like a fluke and so I dismissed my A as any kind of proof that I wasn’t as bad at the subject as I thought.
When I was in primary school I felt quite confident in maths. My parents taught me some basic concepts and my times tables when I was quite young and so I did well at school.
At around the age of seven, we were given workbooks and left to work through them alone at our own pace. It could be because I was in a mixed class of two year groups together and so teaching the whole class would have been difficult.
Anyway, there were seven levels and I raced through the first few books easily. The teacher had told us that completing the whole set would be a fantastic achievement and so I was determined to finish them all.
