I Am Teaching Maths and It Is Personal | by Innocent Ingabire | Sep, 2025 | Medium

I’ve never known exactly what I want to be in life. But at any given moment, I’ve always had a sense of what I do NOT want to do and more importantly, who I do NOT want to be. Back in O Level, one thing was clear: I wanted absolutely nothing to do with mathematics. Or anything remotely connected to it. Not because I hated it but because I was genuinely incapable. I tried. I tried again. And then I accepted my fate: math was for the special breed of people, and I was not one of them. I worked hard (read: painfully hard) and the best grade I ever scraped together in O level math was 40% (I am being very generous here). Eventually, I had a eureka moment: maybe I didn’t have to subject myself to this academic torture forever. Naturally, I concluded that in A level, I would choose a combination with no math whatsoever. But life had other plans. And by life, I mean my mother. Due to circumstances I can not publicly share (this is Medium, not therapy), I ended up staying at the same school fo

I’ve never known exactly what I want to be in life. But at any given moment, I’ve always had a sense of what I do NOT want to do and more importantly, who I do NOT want to be. Back in O Level, one thing was clear: I wanted absolutely nothing to do with mathematics. Or anything remotely connected to it. Not because I hated it but because I was genuinely incapable. I tried. I tried again. And then I accepted my fate: math was for the special breed of people, and I was not one of them. I worked hard (read: painfully hard) and the best grade I ever scraped together in O level math was 40% (I am be