I’m learning English. I am learning to write, to read and to speak. It’s very difficult, but little by little, I’m learning. One day in class, I told my teacher, “If the letters are difficult for me, with numbers, I’m lousy.” She said, “Well, we are going to add math to your classes.”
I have to admit that at first I was very nervous, because this was a new challenge for me. Now I’m learning to add, to subtract, to multiply, to divide whole numbers, fractions and decimals and to prove my answers! Each new learning is giving me more confidence, and I like that. I learned that I was not lousy in math; I just had never been taught math. Math trains me to think better.
When I say math trains me to think better, it’s because I deal with numbers every day. I have to deal with pounds, or even fractions, and I have to be exact.
And before I learned math, it was very difficult for me. Sometimes my boss told me, “You have to share so many pounds of mineral in so many number of cows’ feed.” And I felt bad because I didn’t have any idea of how to do that, but I couldn’t tell him. So I had to use a calculator and even then I was not very sure.
Now I know how to do it without a calculator. I feel relaxed. I finish my job earlier. In other words, math makes my life easier. I can no longer say, “I am lousy in math!”
ES