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[theinevitable]

math, for me, was basically a thing where...
I sucked at it horribly until 7th grade, at which point we had to decide whether to go to the Harder or Easier math class.
the next year, I realized that I was basically awesome at Math suddenly, and started getting almost all As without trying. I have never understood how this happened so suddenly.

[jay-ell]

I hated timed tests.  This is a terrible way to teach math. 

In sixth and seventh grade I took the regular-kids math but the smart-kids science.  (I was the only one to have one but not the other both years.)  In eighth grade, the teacher said you had to take smart-kids math to be able to take smart-kids science, so my parents signed me up for the smart-kids science.  Which was Algebra I. 

Everyone else had taken pre-Algebra the year before. 

I cried every day.  Especially when my older brother, who was a recent college grad with a degree in math and had been tutoring me, ended up getting a job as an extended sub in my math class when my teacher had carpal-tunnel surgery.  Then he couldn't tutor me any more. 

It pretty much blew. 

[littlefallsmets]

I was in the weird position in high school of... always getting the highest grades in English and Social Studies and all the related electives but... basically being just above-average and totally completely disinterested in math and science and foreign languages and stuff like that.

So I was the class nerd/know-it-all/A++ kid in three of the classes a day and the class clown/goof-off/just-coasting-through-to-a-B in two classes a day.

But since it was a small high school, it was basically with all the same kids and yet my role and persona changed with the subject.

The hand-raiser volunteerer grade-curve wrecker in English and Government and Journalism and History and so on and so forth and... the dude in the very back of the room, drawing and passing notes and making jokes just small enough than to not get detention in, like, Chemistry and Normal-People-Math and French Class and so on.

It did contribute, though, to being sort of a wild card who no one really ever got a handle on, which was nice.

I just wanted to go home and listen to Smashing Pumpkins records and watch documentaries and burn incense and write horrible horrible HORRIBLE plays about the girls in the classes ahead of me who were perfect and genius and pure and how I could never have them because I wasn't worth their attention.

Yeeeeeeah.

I was basically Robert Crumb without the mysogyny or the fucked-up homelife.

[smick]

This is pretty much the best thread ever.  I want to have it bronzed, and put on a shelf in my den.

[theinevitable]

dude, i think that is more common than you seem to think.

[jay-ell]

The hand-raiser volunteerer grade-curve wrecker in English and Government and Journalism and History and so on and so forth and... the dude in the very back of the room, drawing and passing notes and making jokes just small enough than to not get detention in, like, Chemistry and Normal-People-Math and French Class and so on.

Me, too...except for a brief period (okay, all of Freshman year) in my particularly ill-spent youth during which I wasn't cutting up in class because I was smoking behind the gym during geometry...and phys ed...and pretty much any class that wasn't English or History of some sort. 

Then I met Pedro and we had Chemistry together, so I attended that class and we made googly eyes at each other the whole time.  And I wrote lots and lots of love notes when I was supposed to be paying attention in math.  You could fill a dumpster with all the notes I wrote, all folded in the clever origami shape where all you do is pull a tab and the whole thing unfolds, and I would decorate the tab with hearts.  In fact, if you had all the notes together in one place, and a dumpster handy, that is probably what you should do with them.  And then douse it with gasoline, toss on a lit match, and run. 

[jaydub]

My experiences with math and science are somewhere between the_inev's and jl's.  I think I was bad at math because I really didn't care about it one way or another.  I saw what the teacher was getting at, then didn't bother to practice it enough to make the leap from "getting it" to "being able to do it with any level of skill".  Science, on the other hand, was totally, deeply fascinating to me, and I was always getting in over my head because I'd take science classes that required more math proficiency than I actually had.

Also, the_inev's experience might have had to do with some sort of brain development that finally got to where it needs to be.  Young adolescents really aren't playing with an adult deck in terms of cognitive ability.  This is a reason why one-size-fits-all curricula fail for a chunk of the population (and why you can be good at one class and suck at another - over and above interest and effort).

My dichotomy came to a head in college, where I ran into walls in chemistry and physics because I'd blown off trig in high school (I hated proofs).  Faced with the prospect of failing in classes I really wanted to learn, I suddenly became Math Nerd and took 3 semesters of calculus.  This was ultimately a bad idea as well, as biologists have little call for much beyond simple integrals and derivatives, while statistics are very, very, very useful.  I learn stats in my spare time now.
**adjusts invisible horn-rims**

[Golfhaus]

When I first moved to the school division I eventually graduated high school in, I was a timid 7th grader who moved away from the only friends he'd ever known into a series of classes that included math. The math teacher in this class graded on a curve. She also announced after each quiz who was the "curve stopper," the one with the highest grade who stopped the rest of the class from getting a higher curve, or God help you, the "curve buster," who got a hundred the hard way and kept everyone from getting any bonus points. I almost immediately became the leader of the class in curve stopping and curve busting. This got me messed with mercilessly with the other boys in the class. The teacher in question thought the best way to deal with this would be to change the seating assignments so that I sat RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THEM - the idea being that they would get to know me and leave me alone.

Yeah, that worked.

Shortly thereafter, English and History became my favorite subjects.

[KeithHernandez]

5th and 6th grades:  remedial math.

7th grade:  honors.

8th-12th:  One year ahead of my class.

College:  Uh, no math.  ever.  again.

[theinevitable]

yeah, at this point I might take the Psych Statistics or Normal Statistics class, but, that is about it.

Which is kind of too bad. I miss Math, and Science. But they're all hell of intense here. All the low-level science classes I'd be interested in taking are the classes they use to "weed out" pre-meds, and more importantly, BME people (biomedical engineering, apparently the hot new Smarty##### major that everyone ends up dropping out of.)

[KeithHernandez]

I really liked Intro to Zoology--especially genetics and evolution-- but the chemistry part was horrible and IDK, just not something that is that important to me.  I don't care why we are here but why we do the things we do.

[theinevitable]

it occurs to me that Human Evolution is a science class, just not a math-y one. That class is sooooo awesome.

[V-Adore]

I'm kind of kicking myself now for not taking any Stats in college. We had some basic remedial stats in several biology classes, but it would have been nice to know a little bit more about chi-squares, you know?

[littlefallsmets]

Oh, man, a good half of my college coursework was just insane puff classery.

Writing for Advertising, Physics for Jocks and Film Majors, Neurobiology for Jocks and Film Majors, 20th Century Literature, History of the Erie Canal, Religion and Film, Religion as Storytelling, Radio Industry... oh man. If there was a cake course in TV/Film or Religion, I took it and if there was a cake course in English that you could take without being an English major, I took it.

Oh man. I should'a just been one of those weird people who stays in the college town and sells poorly photocopied guides to the cake classes for a living.

[linnea]

I'm kicking myself for taking some highly politicized classes when I was in college. I have had to send my official transcripts to multiple companies over the years. I always wonder if the fact that I took Intro to Queer Theory (fortunately it only shows up as "LGBT Studies" on my transcript) has caused me to be penalized and knocked out of the running by some bigoted HR rep or supervisor.