After a long 3 and a half months it was finally time to get back to Dundee and start my second year of primary education at university. I think like everyone you feel as if your brain has shut down and you forget how to get back into the swing of doing work, but after a few days back at uni I feel as if I had never been away. Blogging is part of our discovering mathematics module this year which made me feel a bit nervous. Although I was blogging throughout first year I wouldn’t say blogging is something I am confident in doing so hopefully by keeping up to date with it this year I will become more confident within my writing.

Anyway what this blog post is really aimed at is my previous experience of mathematics and why I chose the Discovering Mathematics module.

At primary school I loved maths as a subject, it was definitely my favourite and something I was very confident in. I would always be that annoying child who would ask if we could play the game sparkle when we were allowed a class game (it was based on times tables), as you can imagine most people in the class went in a huff and said it was a stupid idea. After being out on my placement earlier this year I definitely seen the same thing happening, if a child wanted to play a mathematical game the majority of children would be huffing and suggesting other games such as ‘who stole my pencil’ and ‘head down thumbs up’ – games which I didn’t realise would still be so popular now as they were when I was at primary school. Therefore in primary school I definitely had a very positive experience with maths and went onto high school with a positive attitude.

When I got to high school I still really enjoyed maths, up until the end of 4^th year when I was sitting my standard grades I loved it. It was a subject that I enjoyed going to class and even when I was revising for my exams I wouldn’t mind sitting doing past papers for maths over and over again, I really did enjoy maths and ended up getting a 1 in my exam. So after so many years of enjoying maths and being really confident in it I didn’t think twice about taking higher maths when I went into 5^th year. Maths quickly turned from my favourite subject to my worst subject. A few weeks into higher maths I realised it wasn’t anything like standard grade, it was a huge jump and I quickly fell behind. My best friend and I sat next to each other in class which probably didn’t help things as we chatted thinking we could easily do work at the same time – we were wrong. As the year went on I ended up with a tutor however did terribly in my prelim and my teacher decided it was best if I dropped out and continued it in 6^th year. Although I was disappointed in myself I concentrated on my other Highers and forgot about maths for the time being. 6^th year came and I started maths again… I HATED IT. I dreaded going to class and wasn’t motivated at all. History repeated itself and I ended up getting to the stage where I knew I needed to drop out, this time was definitely gutting as I knew it was my last chance. I left school with good results and I was proud of myself however I just knew in the back of my mind I should have left with my higher maths. Therefore in high school I went from loving maths in 4^th year to leaving school in 6^th year absolutely hating it.

When we had the chance of choosing our modules for second year I seen Discovering Mathematics and was on/off about it, but I soon decided that I would go for it. For a long time maths was something I really loved and I was simply put off it because of higher maths, so I thought this will give me the chance to hopefully look at maths in a positive way again because I knew we would not only be looking at sums and equations but going much deeper into what the meaning of mathematics is and where it came from. So here’s hoping to finishing this module and feeling positive about mathematics again.