MY RECOLLECTIONS
(This short article was written by Terry in early 1985, and was intended for the
audience of a group of university students and educators. The event was sponsored
by Prof Grayson Wheatley, Professor of Mathematical Education at Purdue
University)
Professor Grayson Wheatley has asked me to talk about my own experiences
and recollections of my early childhood. I don’t have many exciting stories to tell you
and my dad is going to talk about me later from his point of view. However, there are
many memories that are very dear to me, some are actually a bit embarrassing, some
funny, but most of them rewarding. I feel I would like to talk about them myself
rather than let dad do it.
A couple of years ago I sat for a state-wide maths competition for the first
time. I was given two hours to do it, but I finished it in twenty minutes and spent the
remaining time devising a method to find the value of pi (π). Afterwards, when mum
found out what I had done and asked me why I didn’t spend more time on the
competition and check the answers, I just said “wait until I get a prize.” Needless to
say that I did not get any prize, and I was very depressed for a while. Dad later
discovered that most of my wrong answers were due to arithmetic errors. After that
episode I learned that I should always time myself during an exam and check my
work. Unfortunately, even now I still don’t attend to the latter very well.
My most frightening experience was when three years ago I got lost in the
London Subway. Mum and I were waiting for a train. When one did come, mum
turned around to check the routes on the wall but I just jumped onto the train thinking
that it must be the right one. Just when I yelled to mum to get onto the train, it was
too late, and the door was closing. Mum yelled something back but I could not hear
what she said. Fortunately a kind lady next to me told me that mum wanted me to get
off at the next station and wait for her there. She actually took me to the stationmaster at the next stop, and I was very grateful to her. However, I was still trembling
and couldn’t talk for a long time when mum found me later. I learned never to
wander off in strange places again, and always “look before you leap”. I still have
nightmares about the London Subway sometimes.
For several years I had a strange habit of chewing biro (note from Billy: a biro
is a ball pen in Australia) tops while working. I remembered once I chewed a biro to
half its size in one afternoon. Then mum bought me a rubber doggie-bone to chew
upon. It tasted horrible, so I stopped my chewing habit soon afterwards.
I discovered that I could learn and remember more if I taught one of my
brothers what I had learned. So I taught one brother maths, and the other music. My
music was never very good – in fact I hated it until I wanted to teach my brother
myself. Now I actually quite enjoy playing duets with him. I spend most of my spare
time finding an interesting way to teach them. I probably learned more from teaching
them than they did from me. However, there was one exception: I taught one of my
brothers chess two years ago but he became crazy about it, and now he beats me
easily.
I can get upset very easily, and my tears can turn on like a tap. Sometimes
when I couldn’t do a question, I might throw away my pen, tear up my paper, and
walk away to my bed and sulk. I might not want to talk to anyone for a while, and I
might shout at my brothers for no reasons. If this happened when dad was around, he
often tried to cheer me up with a joke or something like that. When mum was not
busy she might help me to solve the problem. Very often, however, I just went back
and tried again, and then found that the problem wasn’t too hard after all. I also found
jumping on the trampoline can help relieve my frustration, while playing with my
brothers is a great way to relax after working. I think I’ll be very lonely without my
brothers.
Some people have said that I have a photographic memory, but I am not so
sure. I can be very absent-minded. When I was at primary school I must have lost a
few canteens and lunch-boxes. I also lost my brand new sweater but then the school
found me an older but slightly larger one as a replacement, which actually fitted me
better in the following year. I lost a library book called “Children at Infinity” only a
few weeks after I had started high school. I lost numerous pencils and biros and a
scientific calculator. I even took home one day a wrong school-bag that belonged to
another girl in my class. The day I finished primary school I had a chat with my
principal, and he had joked on my absent-mindedness. He showed me a page of diary
that he had written about me and I had kept the copy because I still enjoyed reading it.
It said:
…Terry used to come to me for maths after he had been to another
teacher for Reading and another for Spelling. He often lost something
in each place or on the way from room to room. One day he arrived
for maths completely empty-handed. He had lost the lot. He came
into the classroom and announced almost tearfully, “I don’t know
where anything is.”
I have lost count on how many things I had actually lost, but I also had picked
up a few cents on the street or at the school-yard sometimes. I reckon I had collected
nearly a dollar that way, but this was not quite enough to compensate for what I have
lost.
Sometimes I wear clothes back to front or inside out. I don’t mind to wear my
woollen sweater inside out because I found it warmer with its fluffy side inside, but I
can’t find excuses for remembering to wear socks on one foot but not the other.
Today I look alright because mum had checked my dress before we came here.
In my first year of high school I had a very good teacher who taught me
General Studies. She asked me to keep a journal and write down any idea in my mind.
She would then read it and write back to me. On some occasions I had complained
that life was not easy: for example, I had to rush from one class to another, or people
expected me to know this and know that; sometimes even my brothers upset me by
scribbling on my work. She had replied that Mr Malcolm Fraser, the former prime
minister of Australia, used to say that “Life wasn’t meant to be easy.” She had taught
me that we all had some kind of success some time in our life, but we all seemed to be
more upset or frustrated by failures. However, we should think positively, and look at
failures as something that could teach us a lesson, something that might give us more
hope to the future. Such are the things that I would like to learn from the more
experienced people. I may be labelled as an intelligent child by some of my teachers,
but I still have a long way to go yet before I can become as wise as anyone of you
here today. Thank you.