My daughter thinks that she had an inferiority complex. In reality, she only had a shy nature. So she resisted in clearing her doubts by asking the teacher. She also started taking tuitions, once both of us started working. Even that could not help her in anyway. Among some odd thirty students she felt alone, in both the school and the tuition.

Eventually there remained a horde of unsolved queries and wrong concepts. This is affecting her now, as she is studying in higher secondary. Her shyness also increased because her fellow classmates were sharp in math. She started doubting herself because of that. She always felt that since her peers were so quick, she would not be able to catch the concepts at all. She developed a phobia of math, even though she was good in other subjects.

She particularly found it difficult to understand the basic concepts of math. However, it was really her lack of social interactions that made her hesitant. To add to this, she was also humiliated by the Math teacher for scoring the least marks. She started resenting not just the person, but also the subject.

She never faced such problems with other subjects. She was always into self studies. She would look up in other books or dictionaries for other subjects, but in math she could not. Her tuition teacher could not improve her performance either. She just told her to memorize the answers by-rote.

As for now, she is performing below average, but I am expecting sustainable score in her Boards. However, preferring to be acumen I will not force her to pursue Math further on, as I do not mean to sabotage my daughter’s mental stability for a bunch of good scores.

Sender’s Profile: Meeta Seth is a mother of a growing up teenager and a Vocational Teacher by profession in Sarvodya Kanya Vidyalaya.

The story was developed by  Vikalp from the anecdotes shared by Meeta Seth.