When I was a child learning math, I felt like I was walking through fog. Each step would present itself, smoky and hazy out of the mist, with the rest of the path obscured.

My teacher would say “Today we learn addition, everyone repeat after me.” I would listen for a few days, and then ask, “What is the one line with the dots? It’s on your poster on the wall there, what does that symbol mean?” She would glare and say “We are not there yet. Repeat your addition tables.”

This repeated, more or less consistently throughout my primary education. When learning trigonometry I asked what tangents could be used for and they said “Calculus” so I asked what that was and they said it was a class I might be able to take as a senior. Self referential answers are not answers. The fog swirled.

Today I read a comic that reminded me of my math education.

Now I’ve heard this argument before, that math is too obscure, it’s too vague for people to wrap their minds around. We don’t teach children the places where math appears in their lives, how it will be used in their future. But that’s not the problem that I had with math.

Children are not any more interested in Home Ec or Accounting than they are in math. As anyone who has taught a teenager to do laundry and clean a bathroom can attest to, relevance to their future life does not make tasks more interesting.

Now, with the most sincere regard for the artist, I don’t believe the issue is complexity either. People are very good at learning extremely complicated activities. Children’s playground politics are more nuanced than anything we expect out of a high school math classroom.

I believe the issue is one of perspective. I felt as though I was walking through fog because I was not told where I was going. The teachers refused to allow curiosity, foster interest and encourage self motivation.

There is a recurring issue in things made for children, that people expect them to balk, turn off and hate things that they don’t understand. But children are the opposite until told otherwise. They ask more questions, they want to learn things they don’t know.

When I was a child, I felt like a person born at least 28,000 years behind. I spent every waking moment trying to catch up. References I missed, skills I lacked, and words I didn’t understand, I would work hard to learn. I may have expected a bit more out of myself than most children, but I think a sense of lacking knowledge is a universal part of being a child.

In other subjects, the teacher’s perspective is completely different. In History class we had to search out biographies and write reports. In science we had to make hypothesis and run experiments. In English we had to read a certain number of books, encouraged to try harder ones and follow our interests.

This is self-motivated, child focused instruction, at least in part allowing the child to answer questions, and get them answered. That was never the case in math.

Compared to the free-for-all of our trips to the school library, math class was a funerary dirge. No one was to read ahead. I had a teacher laugh in my face for asking about negative numbers.

The amount of information they would allow a child to know about math was shameful. And if it wasn’t for my parents’ financial situation, education, and awareness, I may have fallen by the wayside just like the rest of the (overwhelmingly female) people that say they are bad at math.

When I was in second grade, I had a very angry teacher. I cannot speak to the source of her frustration, for I was 7 years old during our time together. But she very much took it out on her young students.

She would call on children to answer math problems. Whenever they answered incorrectly, she would publicly humiliate them. She would share homework grades publicly.

She was convinced we were all terrible and would never learn math to her liking. It seemed as though the standardized testing had begun the year before and her students had gotten bad scores. This was her attempt to force better results.

The fear of punishment had a very traumatic effect on my young mind. After a few weeks I started having panic attacks about doing homework and going to school. I said I was bad at math.

It doesn’t take much public humiliation to teach someone they are unworthy. It doesn’t even take it happening to every student. Children will learn from an example. They will learn that math is painful, stressful and humiliating.

I’ve heard that they have started teaching children number theory. I hope that helps. I worry that culture doesn’t change as quickly as textbooks, though. My classmates are the teachers, and they teach their students their expectations.

My parents let me home school so that I could avoid that abusive teacher. They bought some textbooks, and I learned math. I realized math was easy; I realized I liked it; I realized I would never need to be afraid of math again.

My parents taught me that almost on accident. They told me to read the book, and do a few problems every day. My mom wasn’t a teacher, so she was pretty hands-off. That was the best scenario for me.

I would read a bit, then I would read ahead and review, and back and forth, and I was able to get curious. I could get bored, learn something else, come up with a question and find an answer. I could treat it like any other subject, any other book. I didn’t have a teacher telling me to do drills and repeat and stop and be quiet.

I ended up learning a lot more math than I would have in a school, and with a better understanding than I would have had otherwise. I was able to put together a conceptual framework rather than rote memorizing a series of skills. I went back to public school and never struggled with math again.

I’m so grateful that I wasn’t left in public school to hate math like most of my peers. I learned that math was a language, with nuance and rules and application to everything. I defeated fear with curiosity.

Thanks to that, I was able to progress in science, and now have a career in technology. I’ve been able to understand graphics, percentages, growth and avoided numerous scams. I owe so much to my parents listening to their 8 year old.