## Not a math person
My demotivation surrounding maths cannot be tied to any one event. I slowly
grew to despise math in high school, when the problems began to grow in
abstractness but the purpose of these mathematical tools remained a mystery.
My instructors were generally much more interested in ensuring I could repeat
definitions exactly, use terms properly, and preforms well on their contrived
tests. No matter how hard I tried, I didn’t do well on those tests: partially
because I am not adept at encoding information without context, and later,
because I was told by multiple math instructors that I am not a ‘math person’.
I don’t believe in math people. Surely there are some individuals who are
better suited to test-taking (through either sheer discipline or a superior
memory), and there are those special individuals who are able to generate new
proofs, but on the average people are discouraged from pursuing general-
purpose math who don’t perform well on these early abstract tests. I’ve been
fortunate to have the opportunity to teach myself some of what I missed during
graduate school: neuroscience gave me the context necessary to understand
why linear algebra is important, and suddenly the principals came easily to me.
I am playing many years of catch-up now, but realize my original demotivations
were driven by equal parts rigid teaching style and inappropriate labeling.