Math is Abuse
Yanming Wu
When I was seven years old, my mom hired a tutor, who recommended me to do competitive math. My dad’s eyes glinted at the thought of competitions, like a true Chinese parent, and as a result, I was enrolled in a competition math class a grade above me.
Fall came, and school started. And my math class. Every Friday at 6:30 pm, I would enter the dreaded green door that led into the classroom, sit there, and start doing math, lasting all the way to 9:30 pm. This stretched all the way until winter, so fifteen grueling lessons, and a long test at the end. Now that I think about it, seems like a pretty cruel thing to do to an eight-year-old. In class, I was the quiet kid. I rarely sat with anyone, and just sat there all night long, minding my own business. I would randomly look up to the board, and take some notes, or do the occasional problem. My classmates hardly talked to me, and the teacher rarely called on me. Come time to take the final, and somehow, I got first in the class full of people a grade or two above me with competition experience. I was then selected for the hardest class they had on site for spring.
Winter break zoomed past like an exponential function. In the new class, the time and location were the same, but we had a different teacher. I was a fourth grader in a room full of big, intimidating fifth graders, with all their parents sitting in the back. There were also a few problems at the beginning and the end of class that were timed, and the results were displayed in scoreboard style on the projector screen. I sat in the back, naturally, with my dad besides me.
As weeks went by, I was mostly placed on the podium for the practice problems, and soon began to be known as the weird quiet kid. Back then, I had a really nasty habit of biting my nails in class, which still continues to affect me to today, in which this class played a major role in. Meanwhile, both my mental health and relationship to my parents were worsening by the day. There was a lot of assigned homework, which I spent around an hour on every day. Me being the distracted nine-year-old I was at the time constantly tried to secretly watch videos behind my dad’s back, resulting in a truckload of arguing between us. The tension built up so much that I refused to go to school for a couple days, and him starting his habit of beating me, which lasted for a few years.
One night before class it all crashed. I completely refused to enter that green door that I despise so much, that green door that caused all my trauma and tragedy. I knew what it would mean: another beating by my dad, in the public. Oh great, public humiliation, I thought. So, he started beating me for a continuous thirty minutes. I screamed and screeched, yet the people walking by just glanced at us and said nothing more. No one tried to stop him, no one tried to talk him through, or even just calm him down. The sheer trauma it brought to me still pains me now and then when I’m falling asleep. To this very day I still talk to my therapist about this event, which honestly shaped my relationship between him and I, which will be broken down in a few years.
It gets even worse. After the beating, he drags me by my jacket into the classroom. While class is going on. Everyone is staring at me as I try to fight back, attempting to make my dad drop me. Eventually, I get forced into my seat. In the heat of the moment, I use all my force to punch my dad in the face. It only felt logical after all this pain and humility he has brought me. Something broke inside him. He dragged me out again, defeating the whole entire purpose of getting me inside, which I found quite ironic. And the pain continues. When does this ever end, I thought to myself. The answer was in another fifteen minutes. We both sat on opposite benches for around another thirty minutes, just to catch our breaths and talk things through. Who would have thought that actually listening to others would help? So then, I went back to class.
Things didn’t worsen from then on, but neither did it improve. Life was just, well, life. On the finals, I got second in the class, and made it onto the most advanced class for seventh graders in the whole entirety of China (I was living there at the time). Was building a lifelong (my short puny life) load of trauma worth the math skills? Hell no.
Fall came, and school started. And my math class. Every Friday at 6:30 pm, I would enter the dreaded green door that led into the classroom, sit there, and start doing math, lasting all the way to 9:30 pm. This stretched all the way until winter, so fifteen grueling lessons, and a long test at the end. Now that I think about it, seems like a pretty cruel thing to do to an eight-year-old. In class, I was the quiet kid. I rarely sat with anyone, and just sat there all night long, minding my own business. I would randomly look up to the board, and take some notes, or do the occasional problem. My classmates hardly talked to me, and the teacher rarely called on me. Come time to take the final, and somehow, I got first in the class full of people a grade or two above me with competition experience. I was then selected for the hardest class they had on site for spring.
Winter break zoomed past like an exponential function. In the new class, the time and location were the same, but we had a different teacher. I was a fourth grader in a room full of big, intimidating fifth graders, with all their parents sitting in the back. There were also a few problems at the beginning and the end of class that were timed, and the results were displayed in scoreboard style on the projector screen. I sat in the back, naturally, with my dad besides me.
As weeks went by, I was mostly placed on the podium for the practice problems, and soon began to be known as the weird quiet kid. Back then, I had a really nasty habit of biting my nails in class, which still continues to affect me to today, in which this class played a major role in. Meanwhile, both my mental health and relationship to my parents were worsening by the day. There was a lot of assigned homework, which I spent around an hour on every day. Me being the distracted nine-year-old I was at the time constantly tried to secretly watch videos behind my dad’s back, resulting in a truckload of arguing between us. The tension built up so much that I refused to go to school for a couple days, and him starting his habit of beating me, which lasted for a few years.
One night before class it all crashed. I completely refused to enter that green door that I despise so much, that green door that caused all my trauma and tragedy. I knew what it would mean: another beating by my dad, in the public. Oh great, public humiliation, I thought. So, he started beating me for a continuous thirty minutes. I screamed and screeched, yet the people walking by just glanced at us and said nothing more. No one tried to stop him, no one tried to talk him through, or even just calm him down. The sheer trauma it brought to me still pains me now and then when I’m falling asleep. To this very day I still talk to my therapist about this event, which honestly shaped my relationship between him and I, which will be broken down in a few years.
It gets even worse. After the beating, he drags me by my jacket into the classroom. While class is going on. Everyone is staring at me as I try to fight back, attempting to make my dad drop me. Eventually, I get forced into my seat. In the heat of the moment, I use all my force to punch my dad in the face. It only felt logical after all this pain and humility he has brought me. Something broke inside him. He dragged me out again, defeating the whole entire purpose of getting me inside, which I found quite ironic. And the pain continues. When does this ever end, I thought to myself. The answer was in another fifteen minutes. We both sat on opposite benches for around another thirty minutes, just to catch our breaths and talk things through. Who would have thought that actually listening to others would help? So then, I went back to class.
Things didn’t worsen from then on, but neither did it improve. Life was just, well, life. On the finals, I got second in the class, and made it onto the most advanced class for seventh graders in the whole entirety of China (I was living there at the time). Was building a lifelong (my short puny life) load of trauma worth the math skills? Hell no.
Here you can see my absolutely wonderful nose on this snowy day. This is the tree run in Snowbowl, Arizona. What a shocker: a ski resort in Arizona. I love their chili, especially with hot chocolate on a cold day. Also, I got PTSD from snowboarding from almost falling off a cliff, not pictured here.