Pythagoras Theorem

It’s the 30th of January today and I was just watching this tiktok video about historical figures being “brought back to life” using Ai and one of them was Pythagoras. I reminded me of the math class in senior school where we were first tight Pythagoras theorem.

In my school, and most if not every school in Nigeria running a Nigerian senior secondary curriculum, the classes are arranged by concentration. The arts and humanities, the sciences, and commerce. Some schools have other groupings, other schools have the same but call it different things. This was the grouping in my school.

I personally feel like this grouping made a lot of sense, obviously because it’s designed to streamline the subjects and help the students have a more aided and organized form of learning. But also because a lot of people who share similar interests and strength could also share similar processing methods.

I want to preface this by saying that I was bad at math. I literally only had palatable grades twice in my entire life; Nursery 1 and SS3.

Which is ironic because that was the beginning and end of my preliminary academic career.

Most of the times I slipped through the cracks, made it by a thread, I just wasn’t good at it. However there were specific topics that I was and am good at till this day, and I’m convinced that it’s because of the way it was taught. Sometimes, some of our math teachers tried to paint verbal pictures with stories and give real life examples when teaching. Some of them even went as far as giving us a brief history lesson where relevant. One of those stories is the Pythagoras theorem.

When I was in undergrad, I was literally on my own and this was the beginning of real life and making real life decisions that would impact my future. One of those decisions was picking a study pattern. Picking a study pattern that works for me would guarantee retention and retention would guarantee my ability to produce answers in tests and exams.

I’m not like a normal person that reads and answers past question and remembers just like that, and I’ve known this for a long time. To people around me, I have to read it at least thrice. One for introduction to the concept, one for understanding, and the last for retention. But in reality it’s more than that.

So in 100 level when I was trying to pick one study pattern, I really had to dig deep and find topics from primary and secondary school that I really understood and figure out why I really understood those topics.

I know it sounds like a lot but I could give you 10 topics across 12 years of various subjects that I understood in depth and precisely why but most of them had one thing in common, they were intentionally or unintentionally taught as a story. For example, in new general math I think (or whatever textbook I tried to read math from lol. I used to read math, my God. That’s why I was failing) it started by talking a bit about Pythagoras himself and kind of eased into the topic

I should find that textbook

So it was easier to grasp because I already had a rounded character (for lack of a better word) in my head as I was trying to figure these things out. I kinda of knew what sparked his interest and the birds on the electricity pole looking down (an example my teacher used a lot that eventually came out in the exam) helped a lot too.

So more topics like that made me realise that I’m a visual learner but like a mental visual learner if there was ever such a thing

If there is and it actually has a name please tell me

What I’m reading kind of has to be able to happen in real life. I have to be able to paint out a real life or at least a semi-fictional scenario of what you’re saying to me or what I’m reading.

Which is probably why I’m a good law student and probably why I was good at geometry , particularly Pythagoras, and not trigonometry.

I know I’m not the only one like this and for some people; it’ll be more or less intense than this or just in a console different form, but it deeply hurts me a lot to see people (mostly parents and teachers) plaster people with different learning patterns from other people as ‘dumb’, or ignore or outrightly disregard that their child is different. A lot of times the repeated flonking in school is because their brain quite literally can’t process what you’re saying because of how you’re saying it.

If you’re teacher I’m not blaming you. It’s not your fault that a child isn’t learning. But it’s your responsibility to understand why and ensure that, at end of the day, come rain or high water, that child learns. For that to happen, patience is a no brainer.

You’re not doing anything but hurting your child (or student, or sibling, or whatever). Sometimes people’s differences play in their favour, other times, it doesn’t. It’s better to try and get your child support or at least try to understand what the child is going. And also help the child understand themselves better so that they can support themselves a little if they can. You must remember that this is their norm, so they may not even realise that they’re different from other people. A lot of people aren’t aware of what happens to them. A lot of things I know now is because i tried to learn things by myself, out of a school system and realised that ‘normal’ wasn’t working for me and apparently had never worked on me. If I had that information in primary school, I probably would’ve been the valedictorian twice lol.

I don’t even know if I’m neurodivergent because I’ve not been diagnosed but I know (from what I’ve read online at least) that I have a couple of behavioural and psychological similarities with people with OCD, autism and ADHD. For me, that’s okay now because time has passed and the actions have been carried out and I’ve been able to move passed them, but for others, I’d really like to plead with people to extend more grace to people (especially students and children) because not everyone is dumb, sometimes they’re just different.

Shout out to my teachers Ms Tevi, Ms Nmeribe, Mr Anyanwu, Mrs Ugwu, Mrs Dokun, Mr Nwoko, and Mr Mesioye that didn’t cancel me out as stupid because I didn’t understand what they were saying like the other teachers did and took the extra time to teach me other ways to learn.

Happy Neurodiversity Pride Day💗