Weighted assessment: Is my fear of Maths more than or equal to my wife’s fear of failure?

All Imran Johri wants is for his three kids to have happy memories of school, just like he does. Where does Maths homework fit in this beautiful picture? He scratches his head for new ways to look at his least favourite subject.

Imran Johri is a part-time humour writer, full-time father of three who finds the lighter side to parenting every chance he gets.

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I have a morbid fear of Maths exams. It’s bad because I have recurring nightmares of me in an exam hall, ridiculously unprepared and blankly staring at the problems with zero solutions in my head.     

It’s now a running joke between my wife and I – and I often play up the stereotype of the kind of guy whose DNA is adverse to anything remotely mathematical.

The thing is, it’s all fun and games – until you have kids. And it’s one of life’s surprise Uno reverse cards that puts me in a regretful rage, because not only do I fear Maths, my wife has an equal fear of failure.

Just when things are adding up

To be fair to myself, I was academically excellent in primary school.

My mum was a teacher there and being under her microscope all the time, I didn’t have much of a choice. My grades allowed me to get a spot in a secondary school of my choice, where no one knew me.

I also discovered that in secondary school, I could choose to not do any work at all. And I made that choice with relish.

I failed half of all the subjects I took. My report cards looked as if I wanted to bankrupt my teachers via the excessive use of red ink. And this inevitably led to the consistent and repetitive experience of walking into the exam hall for Maths – with zero preparations.

While I didn’t care so much about the outcome of my zero-effort approach, the act of staring blankly at arithmetic questions for over two hours at a time has had irreversible and long-lasting effects on my psyche. I never really got past my teen Maths trauma.

I’ve had to relearn a lot of Maths skills later in life (so there is a use for it after all!), but even now, the sheer thought of a Maths exam gives me the shivers.

Of course, all this comes rushing to the forefront when my firstborn comes to me for Maths help in Primary 3. Despite my trauma, I endeavoured to help her. I mean, come on, it’s Maths for nine-year-olds, how difficult could it be?

Well, let’s just say this experience did not go well.  

It all came to a head one night when my daughter, my wife and I were huddled over a worksheet at the dining table. It started cheerily enough, till 30 minutes in, I made the manly choice to declare the problem unsolvable. Chaos ensued.

Then tears and shouting from both mother and child, as though someone’s life was at stake.

Smile like you mean it

At the apex of this emotional roller coaster, I called for an emergency meeting of the parental unit. My objective was to identify the core of these emotional spikes and to see if there was a better way to do this.

At first, my wife had difficulty articulating the nature of her reaction, as this was how her parents dealt with her academic struggles. To shout “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT I’M SAYING?” was one way they tried to get through to her, she recounts. She didn’t sound like she was joking.

While my irrational fear of Maths exams was rooted in being tested and then paralysed in abject futility, my wife’s fear was rooted in her parents’ belief that failure in Maths — as well as other “important” subjects, referring to any subject that came with grades — equated to failure in life.

We both came to realise that what we regarded as normal — abject terror for Maths exams for me and fear of failure for her — was not what we wanted for our three children.

What we really wanted was to mitigate any long-lasting school-related trauma that my wife and I could unintentionally inflict on our children. This is not to say we were looking to shield our children from all the pressures of life, but to at least ensure we instill joy in our kids, and not angst.

And this took quite a while for us to digest and to reflect on – for the sake of our children. We needed to come to an understanding of what a vision of success looked like to us, as a family.

We do not have a fully crystallised answer yet, and for now, the focus is on the journey – and that means the consistent and persistent pursuit of building happy memories, even while doing Maths revision.

So for now, whenever there is Maths homework, we try our darndest not to lose our minds and keep things light.

And that is much better than family dinner with the dumbfounded gorilla dad and the soothsayer mum predicting the apocalypse.

For now, that is our life’s equation.