Counting
Muttsu wahhh? So, I’m one of those sad women who is “bad at math.” As a feminist, this is a painful admission. In middle school and high school, however, math was the subject I dreaded most. Just thinking of the many hours I spent struggling with algebra gives me chills. It was…boring, uninspiring, rule driven, dull. I dreaded each and every math class, and struggled for my B+.
Looking back, I probably wasn’t as bad at it as I thought I was. Geometry was easy enough, and I enjoyed learning about the history of Zero, among other factoids. Even so, I still feel intense fear and anxiety around numbers, knowing full well that this is an area where I can easily make a mistake where others might breeze on by. In a world where math and science seem to be the key to a bright future, being bad at math sometimes feels like a disability.
Counting in Japanese brings all of these thoughts and more to the fore. Making things worse, one of the women in my class is a mathematics phd student whose confidence is astonishing. It’s as if I can feel her condescending eyes staring into my soul as I mistakenly add up the total number of “ringo” on our worksheet.
So far, I have found myself shrinking in fear through this entire section, but I think that the beauty of memorization will save me in the end. Because if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s processing useless data (thank you art history studies!) We are only counting to 10, after all.
Ja mata!
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