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Confidence issues
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| Mystified |
Posted on January 24 2009 11:35 PM
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Member
Location: Canada
Posts: 4
Joined: 2009-01-24
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One thing about this is that through your life your will be faced with embarrassing moments of math. When I was younger it felt alot worse. You do gain more self confidence as you grow older and experience sucess in all the other areas that you excel in. Still...it is embarrassing to have the checkout girl hand you a contest entry form to fill in only to realize that the stupid skill testing question (required by law in Canada) is impossibly hard. With people in the line up waiting impatiently I either 1. tell the girl that I don't have time for this and really didn't want to win a Jeep Cherokee anyway, or 2. say I don't have time to figure this out and have some girl of 16 roll her eyes and say "the answer is 20".
Looking over your fifteen year olds math homework and saying "you really look like you know what you're doing here..uh..do you?" to which he groans and says "well yeah, it's just fractions." Or working in retail with a electronic (thank God) cash register to have some smartie give you more money than the till says they owe so that you can give them less coins.
To the major hits like the time the dealership I worked for lost ten thousand dollars because I didn't understand that a factor of one(?) was not the same thing as 1% when I had to figure out the US/Canadian dollar conversion. I'm not sure exactly what the math problem was it's just that I ended up using .01 instead of 1% or something like that. I never did understand it. They were surprisingly good about it but I realized then that I was in the wrong job. Too much math that made me feel stupid all the time.
My point is that I have lots of other successes and I'm getting better at laughing some of this off and not letting it devalue the other things I'm good at. It's tough to recover from the damage done in schools - it haunts me even now (I'm 45). People naively believe things are different now in schools but reading the letters on this forum and seeing my 17 year old go through hell in school, proves that nothing has changed.
I empathize with the comments "when would I ever use this stuff in real life" and thankful that my problem is math and not reading because I can't imagine any reading you don't do in real life.
Hang in there. |
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| HouseMDfan110 |
Posted on April 17 2009 12:23 PM
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Member
Location: No value
Posts: 88
Joined: 2009-04-13
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Dear Mystified,
I feel your pain. I'm still in school and considering to drop out. Did you finnish high school? I have asked many people this, so if you see this question on another thread, don't be alarmed! |
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| justfoundout |
Posted on April 17 2009 08:37 PM
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Member
Location: Texas USA
Posts: 6103
Joined: 2008-05-25
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4/17/09
Dear HouseMDfan,
I've enjoyed seeing Threads that I'd never noticed before. I'm finding them by 'following you around' and reading your posts. And you may already know this (and if so, well that's just fine), but if you click on the 'name' of a forum member, you'll be able to read their profile and see when the last time was that they visited the forum.
'Mystified' hasn't been back to see us since a few minutes after posting this Thread. So, just "don't hold your breath".  - jus' |
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| HouseMDfan110 |
Posted on April 17 2009 11:40 PM
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Member
Location: No value
Posts: 88
Joined: 2009-04-13
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Lol, thanks for the advice, justofundout. I didn't know that.
Eh, if Mystified return to the forum at least he/ she knows I have contributed to his/ her thread. Thanks again! |
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| Jason22 |
Posted on May 19 2009 11:02 PM
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Member
Location: Ohio
Posts: 33
Joined: 2005-11-15
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HouseMDfan110 wrote:
Dear Mystified,
I feel your pain. I'm still in school and considering to drop out. Did you finnish high school? I have asked many people this, so if you see this question on another thread, don't be alarmed! I'll answer this question. I graduated High School through a distance learning program. I don't wish to spam the boards, by telling you the name of the corresponance school I graduated from. If you want to know, private message me. |
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