My Experience with Mathematics

In and around my immediate surrounding, there exist this attitudinal conditioning that has poor effect on our perception of mathematics. Everyone says that mathematics is difficult, so we already feel defeated from home. In school my mathematics teacher started by telling us that we will not succeed as if mathematics was an indomitable enamy. So I did not do futher/engineering mathematics because on the first day of the class, the engineering mathematics teacher said we could not solve mathematics and we are wasting out time with an even higher form of mathematics.
At the start, I was not good at Mathematics but I accepted the challenge.

When I was still feeling defeated, with math anxiety, it was very difficult to learn mathematics. With teachers not helping at school and parents not able to assist at home, I had to seek for external assistance from some older friends who were more confident when it came to mathematics.
I learnt confidence from them and the fact that a mathematical problem could be solved in a number if ways. With that I had to pick the method I was most comfortable with. Learning was not easy, it required more effort and practice compared to other.

When I was still learning mathematics, I had a teacher who whipped me everyday due to my inability to recite the times table. Though I truly could not recite the time, I was good at other things.
I could observe an identify patterns, and make predictions based on the observation. I also knew I could recite 5, 10 and 11.
So I had to observe and note where she started calling on students to recite the time tabe, following her pattern I could tell where 5 would fall so I fix myself there. Not knowing mathematics is not proof that we are not smart.

Playing with mathematical sets made Pythagoras theorem easy to work with because I could see how true the problems were. I could practically see how the length of the sides and angles related to each other.

I had problems solving quadratic equations, because at a point I was always asked to come up with two numbers. It often sound like this "Two numbers whose sum is 7 and whose product is 10"
The problem was the fact that I was told there is no formula for finding the two numbers so it had to be trial and error.

We actually need mathematics in it's various forms in our every day live. We buy, pay Money and calculate our balance. We go shopping and we are told we can get 20% discount so how much are we paying?
When we know that we used 20 litters of fuel to drive from home to school and will like to get fuel that will take us to the market and back home.
If I cooked 3 kg of rice for five people and now I will be having 13 people visiting me, how much rice should I cook.
We really use mathematics everyday, some are calculated in out subconscious like when we are driving and calculating the distance between the car we are tailing and how much pressure to apply to slow down the car based on our current speed.

We use it all the time sometime inconspicuously without noticing it's application.

I will love to call on @udyliciouz @bela90 @samuelnkenta @jozzie90 and @goodybest to participate in this contest