Ok… Hive Reachout Weekly Prompt 44… Let’s go.
My favorite subject in school? I’ll pick one from my high school experience—senior year, that is. I’m torn between two choices here—math and physics. Mind you, these two subjects were by no means the easiest (I mean, there was Civic Education, which was pretty much a free A-grade subject). They were both quite challenging for me, and I guess it may have been part of what made them stand out from the rest. But one more thing I vibed with was the practicality of the courses. In real life, I can play with numbers, and pretty much every concept in physics has real-life applications. As a matter of fact, this aspect of practicality made me like physics more than I did math. I loved the talk about the common forces of nature and the formulae derivations used in trying to solve for them. It was pretty cool.
One class that stood out to me was when we got to calculate the speed of an elevator in free fall 😂! Can you imagine that! A person is in the elevator, and instead of figuring out what to do to save his or her life, physicists thought it convenient to perform calculations in a bid to figure out if the elevator would crash land or not 😅. Not to sound like some twisted psycho, but I just found it funny—I wasn’t even the person who raised that concern in the class.
Overall, physics is a really practical subject, and that made it really exciting as well as easy to grasp the concepts being taught about in class. And given that it was, somehow, one of the most difficult courses in the school, I always got extra aura points whenever the exams were around the corner 😎. Now that I think of it, I could have made a decent sum of money organizing lessons on it for other students. Only that it was probably against school rules and regulations 😆.
On the other end of the spectrum, the worst subjects I had were the almost abstract ones. Like chemistry. Yes, chemistry was pretty much an abstract course for me. Not that that was always the case (we did get to perform some practicals in our school’s chemistry lab). The thing was that the rules didn’t quite stick with me, i.e., the rules governing chemical reactions and all the others. They seemed to change depending on certain criteria, and I was always having to memorize these rules. And for me, the more I get to memorize concepts in a subject to pass that subject, the more I’m going to hate it, simple and short 🙂.
As for math, my love for it stemmed from a love-hate relationship I once had with it. These days, it’s all but love, but there were times when I had something like a phobia for the subject. Those were my academic dark ages 😅. But during my high school years, I was very determined to make sure that the subject didn’t give me a hard time. That challenger spirit drove me to actually relish solving math problems and, thereafter, to love the subject. But the real miracle for me was when I had to take math in my JAMB (Joint Admissions Matriculation Board) exams to be able to get into the university. As it says in my bio, I’m a CS grad, and one of the most important subjects in this field is math. I knew I had to study very hard for the subject in my JAMB exams because, as much as I loved it, I knew I still had lapses that needed improving. And so, I studied. I studied it so hard that you’d think that it was just math that I had to write for my JAMB exams (there are actually three others, making them a total of four).
In the end, I scored the highest grade in math in my school during my set. Although I must admit, the effects of focusing too much on math showed in other subjects, where I scored lower than I usually would as a result of my lack of preparation in them. For me, the truth is, whatsoever it is one sets his or her heart on, you are inevitably going to fall for it. I’m not a love-at-first-sight person. I always believe you can train yourself to love whatever it is you want. So yes, I guess you could also say that I didn’t want to love chemistry 😂.
