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n recalling my high school years, I find that I was a bit childish and somewhat playful. I literally played through my first year of high school until I met a teacher who changed my thinking. After that, I started to pay more attention to my school work. My grades in high school weren’t poor but I didn’t get straight A’s, either. Math was my biggest problem of all. In fact, I never once passed math throughout junior high school and my first year in high school. I always felt like sleeping in my math classes, and even my math teachers wanted to give up on me. Whenever one of my math teachers mentioned students who were poor in math, all eyes in the classroom automatically looked at me. I had given up on myself and I was always laughed at. Then myhomeroom teacher assigned me to attend an after school lesson where they ask those who want to become substitute teachers try to teach. So, they assigned a math teacher to teach me math every Wednesday night. This is where it all changed for me.
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n the beginning, I wasn’t hard working at all. I would feel sleepy just by taking out my math book. I told my teacher that if I ever got insomnia, all he had to do was give me some math problems as a “treatment” and my insomnia would be cured right away. The teachers that were assigned to teach us were university students who were majoring in education. I must say that they have a lot of passion for teaching. My teacher didn’t give up on me even though I still just kept playing for the first month. He tried to talk me into “trying.” One night, I finally started “trying” math. I don’t quite remember how he got me started to do math but whatever he did was effective. He was never mean and he always made learning math fun. After I started to get most of theanswers correct, I began to do the problems in my math book on my own. Turning in my math homework on time used to be an impossible task for me but I began to actually prepare and do my homework before class! I gradually found math more
interesting and I was eager to do more math problems now. My teacher told me that if I wanted to know whether I had mastered a math concept, then I should try to teach it.
He said if I could successfully teach someone else how to solve a math problem, then that means I have mastered that problem myself.
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started asking my classmates if they needed help on their math. But every single one thought I was insane and just laughed at me again. As final examsapproached, our math teacher gave us some small quizzes in class. My scores on the quizzes were pretty good, and I even scored higher than many of my classmates who had laughed at me before. However, I was not honored. I still doubted I could really get good grades in math. My classmates thought that I was cheating. At that point, I was very mad. I decided that I must get good grades on the final exams. I started to preview all of the math lessons and became better at understanding everything. Then I went back to master all the things that I had ignored during the first month of staying after school. I took out my math book and did all the problems in my book many times until there was no more space for me to do the calculations. Then I would take out a piece of paper and do the math problems over and over again. My English wasn’t bad at the time, so I decided to work on math during my English class. When I went home, I would do math problems from seven p.m. to ten or eleven p.m.
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hen the final exams finally came, I was kind of nervous because that was the first time I understood how to do the problems on the test. I finished the test in an instant. My classmates thought that I was just guessing through the whole test as I usually did. Our math teacher always arranged our test papers from the highest score to the lowest. My score was 70, which wasn’t too bad, actually. Although 70 may seem like nothing to some people, it was a huge improvement for me. Can you imagine a student like me who averaged around 30 on math tests could actually get a 70 on the final exam? It was a miracle. At that moment, I realized the importance of putting effort into learning. Our math teacher was proud of me and my classmates were shocked. My math teacher said that he saw how much effort I put into it and praised myimprovement.
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tarting from my second year in high school, I was able to teach others how to do math because I became good at it. I found that the problems in my math book weren’t enough, so I started looking for more materials that could help me improve even more in math. My math teacher bought a workbook for me that was filled with math problems. Using the same methods, I did the problems multiple times and then did more calculations on blank sheets of paper when there was no space left in the book. I put a lot of time and effort into math. I started to enjoy doing math and enjoyed teaching my classmates. I believe that another way to push yourself to improve is to always try to stay ahead of everyone else so that you can help others if they ask you for help.
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fter I caught up to and even surpassed others in math, I felt that it had become a subject that helped me pull up my overall grade average. Even though my math isn’t poor anymore, it still isn’t my favorite subject, however. I still have more passion for English and literature. I used to dream that I would never have to touch math and that I could major in something that has nothing to do with math. Now my dreams have come true, since I am an English major. Although I rarely have to see math again, all of my efforts and hard work in high school weren’t in vain. I learned a big lesson from that experience of putting forth much effort to succeed in math.Achieving success takes effort, not just a little effort but the determination to make yourself better at something or become a better person. I truly believe that through one’s strong efforts, success can be achieved.