Pure or geometrical maths?
 

Did your school report-cards read more like ‘X struggles quite a bit with shape and space but his number and algebra skills are actually quite/pretty good’ or ‘Leyla’s a talented artist and can draw prisms and plot circular points well but doesn’t find simultaneous equations or factorisation easy’?

I was very good at Arithmetic and very bad at Maths

And I was very good at pure maths (especially from “Year 8” onwards) but very bad at geometry.

I put Year 8 in quote-and-un-quote marks because I know the English secondary school system isn’t tabulated by year in the same way as it is in, say, Scotland or Ireland (or is it?). But it’s the academic year where you turn 13 anyway. That was when I first-started going to Kumon (an extra-curricular maths programme) and no-doubt it helped tremendously but I was already sort of half-good at number-maths in the first place. Kind of anyway. There might’ve been some lows with arithmetic along the way but for the most-part I wasn’t too bad up until that point. But (Pythagorean theorem aside) my geometry was never good, not for a split second. During my better maths years I was B+ to A* quality in the algebraic/numerical side of maths but a straight D for geometry, basically.

Best in the class tbh.
I remember for A Level paper 4 my teacher sat the exam with us for fun and at the end he realised he got a question wrong because he looked at my paper after the exam. I score 99 on that paper.

Unlucky teacher.

But yeah. English was always my most natural strong point between those two core subjects (and my best-performing subject generally, even if I wasn’t heavily into the literature besides To Kill a Mockingbird and very little bits of Pride and Prejudice). I was known as the walking dictionary at one point in high-school and one teacher always had to get the dictionary out when she was about to mark my work. I got on pretty well with my English teacher at key stage four and more than made up for a disastrous Year 9 (I smashed the exams even then but Year 9 was very-much my off/naughty year).
In contrast I was only ever half-good at maths, even beyond high school.

i went on to do maths and physics at uni, so obviously not good at either :laugh: