Innumeracy

            During my early years and experiences with the field of mathematics, I often found myself faltering. Instead of reaching for my grade school math book to plow through a series of multiplication problems, I found myself reading almost incessantly. During elementary school, my teachers began to grow concerned about my relative delay in academic achievement in mathematics. In other subjects, I was rather precocious with exceptional performance. I was seemingly unable to do the most basic computational skill and as so, I became very self-conscious about my ability to perform in math. Subsequently, I have had no confidence in my mathematical achievement. 
         As I entered the sixth grade, my math abilities apparently caught up with the rest of my subjects and I began doing very well in everything involving numbers. That year I took the algebra placement test and thereafter took algebra one in the seventh grade. Outwardly I appeared to excel during my middle school and high school courses of algebra, geometry, algebra two, and pre-calculus, yet I never ceased to feel overwhelmed. While I was a junior in high school I embarked into the world of advanced placement calculus and felt immediately beleaguered. As the year progressed I struggled to keep up with the pace of the material presented and, thus, scored a two on the exam and therefore failed.
         With my entire history of mathematics in mind, I would consider myself innumerate. As the definition is stated in Innumeracy, one must feel comfortable in dealing with the nature of mathematics in order to be considered numerate. I have never felt comfortable with myself dealing with numbers and systems, even when others considered me to be a great math student. I have now, in college, chosen a field of study that does not directly utilize mathematics. In psychology I will, of course, encounter numbers, especially in the form of statistics, but I will be able to navigate through the numbers. That is unless I am expected to find the derivative of some given set.