Math! Math! Math!

Math is a science dealing with the logic of quantity, shape and arrangement. In our everyday lives, we’re almost always dealing with numbers. Be it in the business, hospital, industry, school, or even at home, math has become a part of our way of life. In school, it is a major subject with two units that students are always trying hard to study. But how can we study math? Studying this really needs one’s comprehension. Unlike history, it doesn’t require memorization of names and dates of persons, places and events. It is a life subject that only needs our thorough understanding and deep analysis of the problems. It also needs a lot of patience while learning and a bunch of scratch papers and pen in order to master it. Most of the time, it is like a puzzle that gives never ending questions which requires many computations. Later on it will lead us to see a pattern or a connection behind all these computations. It always gives us great satisfaction whenever we’re able to arrive at the right solutions. Math really contributes a lot to our knowledge that we may apply in our daily lives.

Though math is very important, it is one of the subjects that most of the students today really hate. For one thing, students hate it because they couldn’t catch up with it and so regard it as a burden. For me, I don’t really hate math. But that doesn’t mean math is too easy for me. I remember when I was still in the elementary, math was just something that adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides numbers. I would often recite the multiplication table starting from the multiples of 2 to 9 in Chinese together with my parents. So it became simple and easy. Later on, when we became used to these things, fractions and percentage were introduced. It became a little confusing sometimes but it was still fine. Now that we are in high school, as what has been expected, more things come up, more complicated than before that continue to rack our brains. In my first and second year, algebra was like a puzzle. When I first encountered it, I really did have a hard time. Others would always ask me why I was having a hard time because it was just “so easy” but I was just too careless with the positive and negative signs.

Then geometry came. I found proving interesting and so it became easy for me. I got high scores during that first quarter. But at the end of that quarter, proving became fewer. Areas, volumes, and sequencing were taught. Luckily, I was able to overcome all of them and still get good grades (though not as high as that in proving). This year, with advance algebra and trigonometry, I have learned a bunch of new things. I find synthetic division very easy. Aside from that, I have learned to graph functions which are cool but take a long process sometimes. In general, I find math to be an interesting subject. In fact, I’m always challenged by it. And I feel that if one wants to excel in math, he has to treat it as their good friend. Indeed, if we befriend math and have the determination to learn and solve more problems, we will definitely improve our skills and eventually learn to appreciate and enjoy math.