Memory Vignette

Mad Minutes
Here I am, an English major in my second year of college. I love reading and writing, and so I stuck to a subject that I enjoyed when I picked my major. Looking back through years of schooling, however, I don’t think that my love of English is the only thing that has caused me to do well in this subject. It was also a hatred of another subject- math.
In kindergarten, first, and second grade, I don’t remember being particularly different from any other students in my class. We all thought of school more as a game, and didn’t have any notion that any of us were particularly “good” or “bad” at any subject. But that all changed in third grade, in Ms. Carlton’s class. We started to learn multiplication, and to practice our multiplication, we did an activity called “Mad Minutes.” Mad Minutes was a horizontal sheet of paper, filled top to bottom with multiplication problems. The idea was that we had to fill out the worksheet as fast as possible, and those of us who were “better” at math would finish sooner.
Almost every day we would do one Mad Minutes sheet in class. The faded blue and black numbers covered the page so that I didn’t even know where to begin. I watched hopelessly as other students hands would fly across the page, finish their worksheets in what seemed like a matter of seconds, and then being rewarded for being so good at math. I was always one of the slowest in the class. Every weekend I would practice with my Mom- she timed me with the microwave timer while I sat at the counter, furiously trying to finish my Mad Minutes. And yet no matter how hard I worked, I could never get to be as fast as Thomas Chen, or the other students in class who were “good” math students. I never got stickers, or got extra time at recess. Soon I began to feel like math was just something that I would never understand, and might as well not put any effort into.
By sixth grade I was getting C’s on my math tests, and would have to stay inside to do corrections while other students got to play on the playground. The pattern continued through high school, where I barely passed my Math classes, despite being an A student in all other subjects. Last year I walked out of Math in the Social Sciences, the last math class that I ever have to take, and I was thrilled that I never have to deal with math again. But sometimes I wonder how it would feel to be able to do math problems in my head, or to know that satisfaction of actually finishing a really difficult math problem. I should have worked harder in math, but I also wonder what I could have accomplished if I hadn’t been labeled a failure from the very start.