math is cool.

Antonia shares some of her tragic school stories

Yes, you heard it right. I really like math. I love it. I also like physics, I'm in deep love with astronomy, and I think pretty much every kind of science is cool.

So, okay. Now what? What do I want you to tell you?

If I showed what I've just written here to my former math/physics/chemistry/biology/etc. teachers, they would all look at me and would probably asked me if I lost my mind.

The thing is that I love all these things (except biology and chemistry...more about that later), but I suck at it A LOT. And it drives me crazy!

10th grade. 

9th grade was a bad year for me. I felt like I was about to lose my brain and intelligence. Before I started 9th grade I've always been an excellent student. Got nothing else than As and Bs, finished every year with only As in every single subject without putting much effort in it.
Then 9th grade happened and I felt like I was about to lose my brain and intelligence. It was a bad year for me and only bad once followed. My subjects in which I failed the most were all the science related subjects. Seriously, I had to learn how to study. It was completely new to me.

I didn't get problems with math, but I managed to achieve almost every possible grade within a year. I've always been an excellent math student. Until the end of 8th grade I've always been one of the best (sometimes I actually was the top one) of my grade in math. It was super easy for me and I loved it.
After that everything went down a bit and then it went down a lot and then it went up again and managed to get a B at my final exam.
I suffered a lot through math. There have been a lot of lessons where I sat in the classroom listening to my teacher, fascinated by the world of math, but I didn't get what the heck he was talking about. I wanted to understand it so badly. I was no longer math mastermind who reaches more points than possible in exams. I became an average teenager who has to fight for good grades. And teachers didn't even remember that I once was good at all these things. When I started to fail at everything some teachers came up to me and asked what's wrong...nobody did that after 2 years of failure...
Though I suffered the most with math due to the fact that my passion for it hasn't died, it wasn't the biggest problem.

I always found physics quite fascinated but really difficult. I only passed it every year because our teacher sort of taught us only the "easy" things, because we were a group of nine glorious physics idiots and he didn't want that ALL of his students fail at his subject. And my dad studied with me all the time. He's brilliant and knows so much. I'm glad he was there for me.
I really wish I would understand it, because of my love for astronomy. Geez, I love astronomy so much. If I were better at physics I'd totally study it at university. But I suck, suck, suck at it.

Chemistry. Oh dear. I could write a book about 'me and chemistry'. The worst thing that ever happened to me. First of, I'm extremely scared of all chemicals. When we had to experiment with chemicals I always tried not to touch to much and let my friends do the things were you had to handle with this stuff. Seriously, chemicals scare the crap out of me! And I was horrible at everything else too. During my last two years at school I had to do almost every exam at least twice. I think I did one of the oral exams three times to get a positive grade in chemistry. Again we were the same nine glorious idiots, except that not all of us sucked at chemistry and our teacher was not as nice as our physics teacher. And again I somehow managed to get every possible grade within a year.

And then there was biology. Biology has always been this subject I didn't really care about. It has been there. It was nice, not too difficult, easy to manage. And then 11th grade happened and I got really angry. Our biology teacher believed that everything in our biology book is extremely important and everything beyond that too. So we had to study all the time and wrote 5 big exams every year and for each exam we had to study between 50-70 handwritten pages+all the stuff in our book. Which is university style not school style.
I've never been a person who liked to study and there are few things I dislike more than sitting down and try to memorize 60 pages of some stuff you're going to forget again anyway after the exam. That's why I went over to the technique to study only about half of it to get a positive grade. My teacher wasn't that amused about this technique and before the finals (I had to take biology for my oral AND written finals!) she looked at me every biology lesson and said all worried "What are we going to do with you?"
What we did? Not much. I used the same stragedy for my final exams and studied only half of it and for my oral exams I only studied only like a third...um...it was risky. But I passed. Somehow.

That's only my short story about science. My life at school wasn't easy. I literally transformed from a mastermind into an idiot.

I tell you, if I hadn't lost my intelligence when I was 15 I would most likely study math or astronomy at university. I'm not kidding.

PS.: Calling myself an idiot doesn't mean that I see myself as a completely stupid person. I know that I have a certain intelligence. It's just that I finished 8th grade as an excellent student and after the summer break I returned as someone who permanently failed and got bad grades. It wasn't easy for me. I didn't understand the world anymore and it wasn't easy for me to accept that school is no longer easy and that I'll never get back to good grades.
This whole thing turned me into a student who doesn't give a damn about school and grades...I'm not sure what to think about that. It makes me cry and the same time I'm totally fine with it.

PPS.: Sorry if this post was amazingly boring for you. I got the urge to write this down...