Christian Xu

ENG 21003 – Introductory Letter

Professor Zayas

Feb. 9, 2023

Twelve-By-Twelve

        I still vividly remember the early years of my childhood, especially those during kindergarten and the first few years of grade school, where I was pressured and bombarded by my parents to practice my multiplication and times tables. Every day my mother would approach me, pencil and notebook in hand, and scold me into learning the basic times tables from one through twelve. Henceforth, my early childhood days as a student would start with me drawing a twelve-by-twelve matrix and labeling the spaces above the top row in ascending numbers. I would practice over and over again through trial and error, tally marks, counting fingers, and occasionally cheating from the back of my composition notebook until I filled in each square correctly. After I had earned my mother’s approval to move on from this irritating chore, I believed foolishly that I was out of the woods, but of course, she had more assignments cooking up, ready to dish out once I happily completed the ones before. I was tasked with reciting the entire table out loud by heart starting with one times one, a task I deemed impossible at the time. Nevertheless, I knew that the first steps to accomplishing a difficult goal were always painstakingly slow and arduous, like baby steps. Following in my previous footsteps I started my recital of the times tables with one times one. Whenever I got stuck on a particular times table I would always resort to the tried and true methods that I developed on my own while I was on this path of learning. Not long after I could recite all 144 times tables with my heart, mind, and soul, which I thought impossible previously. Later on, my mother delivered the final exam, a series of random, rapid-fire, barrages of times tables. With every one that fired from her lips, my lips fired back with the correct answer. This time it came instinctively to me without thought. These times tables came instinctively to me and at this point, they weren’t just etched but seared into my mind. Years later the idea of taking time to master a topic on my own would prove increasingly important and prevalent during my late elementary, middle school, and eventually high school periods.

A personal experience of mine that most people don’t know about, except family members and close friends, is that I had surgery before starting grade school, at the ages of five or six. At the time I didn’t quite understand why I was always in and out of hospitals and doctor’s appointments. I was unaware of how poor my health was at the time and that I needed something as major as surgery to fix it. At the time, I had no idea how much my parents were going through mentally, and neither did I know what I was about to go through. However, on that particular day, I knew it wasn’t just a routine hospital check-up since I was woken up at the crack of dawn with no breakfast in my stomach except a glass of water. At the hospital, I calmly took the nurse’s hand and walked with her to the operating room while my parents held back tears. As I got a little older I was perplexed as to what type of surgery was performed on me, seeking my answers through medical science. I knew from a tidbit of background information provided by my mother that the procedure was a type of ear surgery. Lo and behold, after several years I discovered on my own that my particular procedure is known as myringotomy. Thus, this was yet another example of how my childhood experiences provided the fuel source for my desire to study science as well along with math.

Looking back, I believe that it was these pivotal moments in my childhood that provided the stimulation in my young mind to foster and ignite my curiosity for math and science. Starting from second grade onwards, I was introduced to the dreaded idea of the “science project”. I was initially thrilled at the concept of deriving my hypothesis and carrying out experiments to prove its validity, that was until I had to present my findings to the class. As a result, this was most likely one of my earliest fears associated with school. Subsequently, this initial poor experience with public speaking was what developed into one of my first fears of school: presenting and public speaking. Granted, this was most likely the first time I had to speak openly in front of an audience. Although I have no recollection of it now, suffice to say, it was probably a lackluster performance since my speech anxiety never quite left me entirely, even now.

Upon reaching high school I experienced an entirely new host of educational stimuli. New teachers and students every semester meant that I was learning my favorite subjects through vastly different teaching methods. Some teachers would strongly advise us to take copious amounts of notes from their paragraph-long slideshows. Other classes were a fusion of science and art classes, where the teachers would encourage us to draw diagrams and visual aids to improve our studying potential. From a visual learner’s standpoint, this method of learning was exceptionally beneficial for comprehending more complicated topics that auditory learning simply couldn’t provide. While drawing graphs, diagrams, and pictures in my math and science class I couldn’t help but recall how far I had come from constructing those bothersome twelveby-twelve matrices of the past.

The current fear that I possess relates to my passion for math and science. Knowing that I wanted to pursue a career in math and science since grade school, and being even more adamant about it now that I graduated from high school, I developed a fear of failure, specifically not being able to achieve my passion and consequently having no other alternative options. I have such a strong adoration for math/science that I worry I won’t be happy doing anything else besides it if I fail. As a result, this predominant fear of failure also comes with it a tremendous amount of self-blame when I fail to live up to my expectations. I’ve always placed the fault of failure on my shoulders, more so than being infuriated at a person because they failed me.