Dyslexic's Diary PAGE_3 - Being “Different / वेगळा” continued

[For people who don’t know me - I did my engineering (Computer Science) from MIT Pune, was in the US for a few years, returned home by choice and started business, running the company for 20 years now, have worked in extremely complex systems, have few patents. And I believe I am fortunate to get here]

In Sixth standard, I failed in Math in the first unit test of the year, got 6 / 20. Aai was pretty angry and scolded me a lot. She then found a teacher to give me private tuition, I hated those i) kids usually don’t like teachers coming home ii) it reduced my play time. Anyway, it did not change anything, I continued to struggle, mostly in Arithmetic/Algebra.

• As mentioned in previous post, memorizing tables was difficult so I found a trick, started doing additions in the background while saying the tables aloud.
• Multiplications, started doing approximations, or some other shortcuts - say, for 16x12 = 160+32 or 17x9 = 170 - 17, etc.
• Subtractions and Divisions were horror then and are even now

In Ninth standard, Raju (Rajiv Binwade) moved to Shrirampur and became my best friend for life. Once he saw me struggling with fraction multiplication, that 6/7 * 8/3, I thought it was done like (7*8)/(6*3), I still vividly remember surprise on Raju’s face. He took me aside and taught me how to do that - remember that was 9th std.

While working on squares, I saw a pattern and came up with pretty easy way of finding square of 2 digit numbers. See the image on right.
I didn’t share this with math teacher though, didn’t have confidence, probably didn't even share with friends, instead talked to Makwana sir who had been supporting me since 8th, he appreciated and told me to come and talk to him for any such things. 

There’s nothing great in this method, it’s just (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2 + 2ab, which I realized later while showing this to my kids when they were doing squares.

Glad that calculators are handy these days!

***Note: Govt has many provisions for children with SpLDs and allowing the use of calculators in exams is one of them***

I did not study well, rather did not know how to study in a structured manner. Don’t remember what I did but do remember watching the complete test match against Pakistan just a few days prior to board exams, we lost by a tiny margin, Sunil Gavaskar played great and got out on 96 in last innings chasing.

I have included my SSC mark-list in the pictures, check the marks. I would like to parents to look at their own mark-lists and see what they are doing now in 40s and how much of it is due to those high/low marks, and/or are they doing what they planned/dreamed they would be doing in the future. I do not want to preach about the marks, but would like to suggest to the parents, who feel their child is not like others and are expecting/pushing her/him to do-better/excel by working ‘harder’, to exercise caution, reduce expectations and listen to the child. All the child wants/needs is appreciation and acceptance from parents. Just try to read the faces of children when they are telling the exam results.

Well, after getting to 11th, something inside me changed, I started liking the subjects, may be because History, and language grammar wasn’t there. More importantly the subjects started coming closer to my abilities of visualizing, may be not all - inorganic chemistry was still not so easy. Calculus, Physics, Biology, Organic Chemistry were extremely simple and I started spending some time daily (not more than 2-3 hours) after college solving problems.

To be continued...