Friends! Indians! Puppies! Lend me your ears. I have done what many considered impossible. I passed all my exams!
Now, for all the smarty pants and future MIT-IIT-types reading this, I know what you’re thinking. Pffft. Passed! What’s the big deal about that? You all live in a world of enrichment and genius programmes and summer camp at Harvard. But for the rest of us — okay, for me — life and number properties are very difficult. And, considering how I pulled the plug in three papers during my mid-term, my news of all-subjects-all-pass is nothing short of a miracle.
It has also saved me from a lifetime of after-school tutors which is what my parents were threatening me with after my three fails last time round.
Now, I have nothing against tutors. I’m sure they’re great! But I have not had the best experience with them. In Grade 5, I had a math tutor — K Sir — who would come home twice a week to help me with homework and clear my doubts.
Missing the point
K Sir was nice enough. He worked in some IT company and tutored on the side so that he could save up for a new motorbike. Now, if you ask me that’s a sign that education doesn’t pay. I mean you spend all those years studying engineering to get a job that doesn’t pay you enough to buy your own bike? And then you have to tutor math-haters like me for it? What’s the point?
But K Sir had a bunch of problems. For one, he would try and make math fun by using stories from movies. Which would be cool if he used examples from the Marvel Universe. But he kept talking about these old movies that no one had ever seen. Example ‘Viru and Jay are trying to catch Kalia in the movie ‘Sholay’. How fast does their bike have to travel to overtake Kalia who is on a horse travelling at x mph? They start ten minutes after Kalia.’ First of all, it totally depends on the horse — what if it’s tired and hungry? Then, it depends on the bike too right? K Sir should know that better than anyone else. What does math have to do with this stuff? And then if I made the mistake of telling K Sir I hadn’t seen Sholay he would spend 45 minutes telling me the story. At the end of the hour I’d have done one sum! To make matters worse, he’d stay for another hour to do the actual teaching! Amma had to stop him after a few months, because while I knew all the storylines of old Hindi films, I didn’t know any actual math. And I’d missed out on a whole bunch of cricket matches in our society too!
Update: I have just been informed that since I have proved that I can pass exams, with a little extra help I can do even better at school! I’m meeting my new tutors this week. Sob. There is no justice in the world.
