Write your letters in the sand for the day I'll take your hand, In the land that our grand-children knew

So, I spent seven hours studying for a math test over the weekend, and still failed it.  For the first few hours afterwards, I was crushed.  I was ready to raise the white flag in total defeat, but then I realized something.

So what if I'm not good at math.  I can draw, I can write, and I can speak to people.  But then, while I was watching Star Trek, it hit me.  In this idealized Space faring future, there'd be no room for me.  I'd need to understand Warp theory, and transporter beams, and Photon Torpedoes, and Phasers.  None of which are high on my list of things I think I'll understand.

It's fully coming to me now that people who excel at the Arts but not in much else are deemed to be dumb, or problem children.  I know my math teacher from grade 9 and 11 told my mother several times I didn't belong in the Academic/University streams, not that she made much of an effort to get me to understand it.  It's my firmly held belief that we are focusing so much on Math and Science now, that people who think differently are being left by the way side because we're too hard to teach, or because we don't think the way the "norm" do.

Personally, I'm a tactile learner.  Give me something to fiddle with that'll aid me in understanding, and I'm a happy kid.  But because that would require extra effort, most teachers don't bother with it.  My current math teacher is even worse, she goes home at lunch, taking her kids out of the daycare to watch them at home.  Pretty evidently, her attention is elsewhere, and she doesn't seem to like helping much when extra help is asked for.  Not a terribly encouraging woman, either.

Back to the subject at hand, I can draw pretty well for someone with no real formal training.  I didn't learn from books, I just sort of did it.  Looked at examples and drew them from that.  Apparently that's a rare skill to have, not needing templates when drawing.  Also a skill which is being phased out of "mass production" in schools.  Students aren't really encouraged to think for themselves, to learn for themselves, they're told to listen in their seats, and then regurgitate the information.  I can't do that, it's boring, I end up doodling in the margins of my pages.

If school teachers have their way, Math and Science will become the art, it'll be what everyone is good at, and learns the same way, and that is a dismally depressing future to behold.

-Red.