The Thrill of the Challenge

By Louisa C. 

Created by Natalie M. on Toondoo

Throughout my educational career, the math classroom had always been my safe haven, a place where I found myself the most confident in my mental abilities and comfortable with learning new material. That was until I was introduced to geometry.

For me, algebra had been a cakewalk. As monomials evolved into binomials, and then advanced to polynomials, I never once had to think twice about the numbers I was working with. I could practically graph, solve, multiply, and divide these entities in my sleep. I found myself the unofficial tutor of my algebra class, the “phone-a-friend” option for all of my peers who struggled with these concepts. Solving multiple equations by graphing was a particular favorite topic of mine. I would march up to the front of the class to present my graphing masterpiece on the board as my peers watched in awe, holding the perception that I had somehow been blessed with unbelievable mental abilities allowing me to so quickly comprehend novel topics we had just learned minutes before. I felt on top of the world; the algebra classroom was my track and I was Usain Bolt, sprinting to the finish line with ease, making my accomplishments look effortless.

On the first day of my geometry class, I waltzed in with the expectation that the course would be breeze. My classmates had already strategically positioned themselves to sit as close to me as possible, allowing easy to access to ask for help. For about the first month or so, I was able to hold on to the new material, but the deeper we went into the course, the less confident I began to feel in my abilities. The first topic that truly stumped me was the Pythagorean theorem. I found myself extremely frustrated, I had always been able to work problems with triangles easily in the past, so why was this new concept so challenging? Who was this Pythagoras anyway, and what made his ancient Greek discoveries so important? My reputation as the “go-to-the-head-of-the-class” student quickly began to slip, as my peers began to notice that I was just as perplexed, or possibly more so, than they were.

Embarrassed, I attended every after school tutoring sessions that was offered, hoping to regain the abilities that allowed math to come so easily to me. I was able to maintain an A in the geometry course, but I had to put in much more work than I had in the past in order to understand the math. As the class came to a close, I realized that even though the topics in geometry challenged me more than those of my past math classes and revoked my nickname of the “math genius”, my love for the subject never once faltered. I began to realize the true appreciation I had for math itself. Instead of enjoying the subject because it was historically so simple for me, I found myself having fun crafting equations and breaking down word problems, appreciating the times I ran into a dead end and celebrating the times I overcame those obstacles.

Even when I entered the second level of algebra, and math once again became easier to understand, I did not find that I loved the subject any more or less. I was just having fun being introduced to new theories, equations, and concepts, allowing new opportunities to see how math could be applied to my everyday life and new ways to approach problems I faced. That being said, in all my future math courses, I do not hope to find easily comprehensible and simply understood materials, but rather a mentally challenging experience that unlocks new ways to think about the nature of systems and structures within our world. I have discovered that not only in math classes, but in my all areas of my life as a whole, it is the challenges I face that present exciting situations which allow me to explore new information about both the surrounding environment and myself.