lousy at math
I got put in Kumon because I was lousy at math.
I could never seem to stop making silly mistakes. I have a very vivid memory of looking at a test where I’d copied 32 as 23, saying over and over to my dad, "It was 23 when I took it, I swear it was!"
He'd say "You didn’t check it twice, Divya. Always check it twice." And I’d say I did, it was 23 the second time too!
Anyway, they put me in Kumon, just for math. I did the placement test thinking this is pretty easy! When I got it back, I remember asking, "Do the red ticks mean correct, by any chance?" because there was more red than not. I still remember the kindly look on the old Japanese man's face as he shook his head no.
(This was, in fact, how I talked when I was six. I read too many books and didn't have enough friends).
Anyway, I was in Kumon for about two years. I hated going as much as they probably hated seeing me. I used to stick my hands in my pockets and whistle defiantly in line. The pretty grownup daughter of the old couple who ran it used to tell me off, saying, "Whistling isn't ladylike."
Which made me do it even more, because I hated girliness as much as I hated boys, two ironclad stances that somehow did not strike me as contradictory.
I'm not dyslexic, by the way, but my mother is. I had this issue only with numbers. It went away with time.
They gave us worksheets to take home. My mother was supposed to make sure I did them, but she was just as scatterbrained as I was.
We had an after-school program called Extended Care, for kids whose parents couldn't get them till six. A snack, a second recess, and then homework time for two hours. We weren't allowed to talk or do anything else during homework time, even if we were done with our assignments. They didn't want kids pretending they were finished so they could goof off.
Well, I'd spend that time finishing three days' worth of Kumon worksheets. At least I did in the beginning. It turned out the other girls were so bored that they jumped at the chance to occupy themselves, even with brain-dead addition.
With this outsourcing I eventually avoided doing Kumon take-homes altogether It was fun game, all of them trying to write in the same penmanship.
Looking back I can't believe Extended Care was only for three hours. It felt like an absolute eternity.
These days three hours — even three weeks! — pass by in no time at all.
It's the damn phones, I'm telling you.
Anyway, I decided I hated math. Really hated it. It was part of my identity, as much as hating girly things and hating boys.
My dad bought me really stupid books with titles like Ted Hates Math! and really clever books that brought out the beauty of math through stories, like The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat.
I saw through it, of course, and read the books with intense interest while pointedly ignoring the helpful exercises at the end of each chapter.
This was when I lived with him for a year, when I was ten. He would come home every night from work ready to spend Quality Time with me, only to find out I’d loafed off the whole day climbing trees and he had make me stay up late doing math.
Poor man, what else could he do? It only made me hate math more, though I had fun drawing unflattering cartoons of him in the margins of all my notebooks.
I went back to my mom after a really bad incident at the San Diego Zoo — rather, in the parking lot of the San Diego Zoo.