Becoming Okay With Failure and Letting Go of Educational Trauma

I brought baggage into my current class, and it dawned on me that sometimes we have to check ourselves because we hold onto trauma in certain subjects.

These subjects did not come easily to us as children, whether it’s because of our environment, a learning disability, or something completely outside of our control.

I’ve been focused on a growth mindset, telling myself, “Hey, just because you have math trauma doesn’t mean that you can’t do this class.”

Growing up, I had a really rough childhood, and math was one of those things I just didn’t study for, nor did I retain anything because I never had time to understand it, let alone believe that I could do it as a child.

I remember being in an elementary class, and my teacher at the time handed out multiplication sheets. I remember thinking the addition signs were lopsided.

It must have been a mistake!

Or so I thought as I added everything together.

I don’t remember the teacher teaching multiplication tables before that moment. I had been following easily along before that, but once that moment took place, my confidence tanked, and the next thing I know, I was placed in special educational classes for mathematics.

After that, I just didn’t try.

Also, being that my environment was volatile, I didn’t see the purpose of academics at one point, as I was just trying to survive at home.

My confidence didn’t peak back up until adulthood

It all turned around when I graduated high school and went to college and took a placement test.

I had been placed into adult basic education classes, and I was not happy with that because I knew I could do better.

I spent a month studying math on my own, everything I could about algebra, and I went back, took the test again, and placed two spots above where I had placed.

This alone taught me I could do it.

That I was a great learner and that I was an auto-didactic learner and that sometimes it was just easier for me to understand things on my own at a self-paced level than being taught by someone else’s perspective.

Over the years, I would notice that if I had two teachers, and they both taught differently, it would confuse me because they were very set on their way of doing things.

It took me a long time to realize that sometimes you have to bend to the rules of the teacher.

Even though that might not be the rule of the subject you’re learning, because teachers bring their own baggage and perspectives to what they’re teaching as well, which can cause confusion for a student that’s already confused.

So here I am in 2024 now, taking statistics after my advisor encouraged me to take it.

She had seen that I already took college-level algebra. It’s been a while since I’ve been in school, so I don’t remember everything I’ve learned, and tonight, my first attempt at getting started, I made a ‘fool’ of myself.

I was already wary of the whole subject, more like nervous, and my statistics class uses an online platform.

The first tutorial wanted students to input exactly what it told them to input, and I did just that, and I kept getting an error message. So for a while, I thought maybe I had to solve these problems, and so I tried to solve them, and the error messages continued.

I began to think maybe I don’t know how to solve them, so I began to try different answers, and then I started looking online for answers and trying that, and I kept getting the same error message.

Finally, I reverted back to the original plan and inputted them once more just as they already were, and they were all correct. I think between my anxiety, past baggage, and the error messages, I automatically assumed that this was a downhill spiral due to my knowledge gap.

I was going to have to solve things I didn’t know how to solve, and it became this ordeal that almost left me in tears. Tonight made me realize that moving forward, I need to make sure that I set my baggage aside and I show up as who I am now.

As the person that is able to learn on their own and has been able to prove to themselves that they’re able and capable of learning new concepts no matter what subject.

The reason I wrote this blog post

I know there are many people just like me who have had educational trauma through no fault of their own and through things outside of their control.

I know for me I struggle a bit with learning, and it has to do with my anxiety caused by the confusion of not knowing much and having a big gap in my educational journey.

Admittedly, I also wonder if there’s something that I wasn’t diagnosed with like dyslexia because I had to read the instructions over a couple of times for it to make sense to me.

There have also been other signs now looking back but went unnoticed. I was a college-level reader by middle school.

Back then the only sign that was considered for concern of dyslexia was struggles with reading. I didn’t have that problem. But spelling even though I loved it, was tough at times.

There were times when I would mispronounce words because the M and N sounded the same, so I would interchangeably say ’emeny’ and enemy.

Sometimes it would be simple misspells.

For gratitude, I would spell it ‘graditude.’

Exercise was spelled ‘excerise.’ I also mispronounce this one too.

I would say ‘labtop’ instead of laptop sometimes, ‘fighterfire’ instead of firefighter.

The list goes on, and I remember getting teased at times and feeling like the odd one out even when I had a group of friends.

Which leads me to say I know dealing with baggage, past dealings with education, and learning disabilities alone can make a student snowball downhill.

Suddenly they’re either dropping classes, withdrawing, or they’re just not trying because internally they have already conceded and given up.

I don’t want that for anyone, so hopefully, this lets you know you’re not alone and that the only thing you do is just take it one task, one homework assignment, and one problem at a time.

If you get an F at the end of the quarter, that’s okay, it means you tried.

You know what you have to do.

You know where your gaps are.

You know what you have to focus more on, and you know exactly where you have to go now.

Don’t let ego be the thing that stands in front of success.

Always be mindful of your ego and when it leads your decisions

Watch out for it because I found myself thinking there’s no way I can drop this class when there are people I know who got A’s in it last quarter. There’s no way I’m going to tell them that I’m dropping this class.

Admittedly once more, I had to check myself and ask the questions…

Are you really going to put yourself aside just for your ego, when you could be making a choice that would be more beneficial for you in the long run?

Are you really more worried about them than what you’re doing for yourself?’

Part of mature introspection is realizing that a dropped class could be the best thing for me to do until I become more familiar with algebra, and ego shouldn’t be at the forefront.

For a split second, ego was leading, and then I was able to check it.

No matter how great you get at introspection, you’re going to always have to check your ego because it’s part of who you are.

It’s part of being human.

With that said, I’m signing off. It is 8:18 p.m., and I’m tired. I probably won’t publish this tonight, but the date is April 2nd, and I’ll publish it when I can.