I received a U in mathematics. Not a D, not an E, not even an F. I had failed so badly that my paper wasn’t awarded a grade at all. I received an E in Computing, which barely allowed me to continue into the second year, and the much needed B of my GCSE science retake.
This wasn’t the first taste of failure. I’d been approaching it for most of secondary school, teetering on the edge of a passable grade saved only by external tutoring. In the summer before my first year of college, the teachers sent out a take home entry exam for maths that I again barely passed despite having access to academically inclined friends and Google.
So, I finished my first year of college. At this point the summary of my time in academia had gone from barely passing, to absolute failure. I met with my computing teacher to discuss my grade, and was strongly advised that I leave the college and join a vocational school. I was already considering it and, though hurtful to be advised for the first time in my life to quit, it was the obvious next step.
My Mathematics teacher couldn’t have been more different.
He was endlessly enthusiastic, the sort of teacher who genuinely wanted every student to succeed.
He admitted that pursuing a different discipline might be wiser. But then he said something that I still remember, that I had potential. If I stopped wasting the limited amount of face-to-face time we had, completed the homework, prepared for the exams, and simply took the subject seriously, he believed I was capable of passing.
When the time came to inform the college of my decision, I requested that I be allowed to retake mathematics, continue computing, and for my remaining free slot to pick up physics A level (which was absurd, given the facts).
I was asked to meet with the head of Physics, who simply asked why I wanted to study it. I didn’t honestly have a good reason besides that it seemed interesting, and in my naivety shared that I had read some books on the matter that I quite enjoyed. He looked at my grades, looked back at me with what can only be described as horror, and told me plainly that if I found mathematics hard, I would find physics much harder, but that if I’m serious about taking it he won’t stop me.
I had never studied before. My idea of studying before exams was gently reading through assigned books while thinking about other things, reading a page and immediately forgetting it. I was determined to take college seriously this second time around, and pushed myself to write detailed notes in classes, do every homework on time, and go to every extracurricular help session. Keeping my attention span for an hour’s lesson felt exhausting. It’s hard to communicate just how little effort I’d put in before, and how hard it felt to adjust to even a reasonable degree of attention.
Exam season rolled around and I went in with confidence: this was the most amount of attention I’d given anything! And after the whirlwind of exams I waited through summer in anticipation of results day, feeling equal parts satisfied with my effort and optimistic for the outcome.
I walked to the college surrounded by friends and acquaintances from school, everyone eager to see what their future holds. I was anxious, and although I knew I was doing a 3rd year of college regardless, the idea that those around me would be finishing and going off to work or university had not quite set in. Still, I was hopeful to see the fruits of my labour, and opened my sealed grade packet in my circle of friends.
After what I thought was an extraordinary effort, to receive grades below a C shook me to my core. The thin veil of self respect and the air of confidence I held was gone in an instant, and my whole self image deteriorated into nothing. What was I supposed to do? It was widely known by my peers that the second year of both physics and mathematics were significantly more difficult, and that anything below perhaps a B was a sign of the failure to come. I had already squandered one year. Had I lost two before having to start entirely over again in a vocational subject?
I met again with the mathematics teacher who had unintentionally and unknowingly convinced me to try again. He smiled.
“You passed!”
It was perhaps the only positive reaction to come from anyone, friends family teachers or otherwise. To me, the D proved that an extraordinary effort had produced a less than ordinary result. To him, it showed how much ground I had covered. He explained that while the grade was not impressive, the ground I had covered was substantial. I had filled years of gaps in my knowledge and built enough new understanding on top of it to pass. Anything above an E permitted me to continue. Then he asked whether I had taken the year as seriously as I could have.
Had I really given it everything?
That summer was spent in self reflection. Had I really given it everything? It was undeniably the hardest I’d worked towards anything, but between spending time with friends, relationships, video games, television, had I really given it my all?
My girlfriend at the time was privately educated, and appeared to spend every free hour studying. While I went home between lessons, she remained in the library. When I finished my hour of homework and opened a video game, she opened another worksheet. When I wrote off Fridays and spent long weekends with my friends, she pre-read the following week’s lessons.
My second year had taught me how to study, at least for short periods. Watching her made me realise that going into my third and hopeful final year, I needed volume and sustained focus.
Driven almost entirely by my refusal to be an academic failure, I hit my third year with everything I had. As well as continuing into the second year of Maths and Physics, I also opted to retake the first year too.
Almost every waking moment of those nine months was devoted to my education. I pre-read the day’s topics an hour before college. I arrived in the morning and stayed until the evening, no longer going home during the gaps and instead staying in the library. Immediately after each class, I completed the assigned homework. Then I found additional worksheets of dozens or sometimes hundreds of questions on the topic and pushed through to complete as many as possible, and took any I could not solve to the next help session.
I wrote everything down. Even if I felt I knew it well, I put pen to paper. Repetition. Constant. I wrote and rewrote pages upon pages on topics. I read, reread, and revised everything until the process felt automatic.
My childhood bedroom was an attic beneath a triangular roof, with my bed positioned at the centre. With pages upon pages of facts, formulas, and explanations taped to the walls, visible and readable no matter my place in the room, they were the first things I read in the morning and the last at night.
I allowed myself forty five minutes in the evenings for television and video games, and spent most of that time anxious to get back to studying.
During that year, I played the same two albums during every study session. Together they lasted just over an hour, so their ending became my signal for a break. Before long I stopped hearing the lyrics; the opening track simply switched my brain into study mode like a Pavlovian response. To this day, hearing those songs throws me back to the desk and those long days of study.
When I turned eighteen, I received £3k in bonds. I spent every penny on tutoring. I met with a physics graduate twice weekly, where we tackled both math and physics problems I couldn’t solve on my own.
As soon as I had enough knowledge on a topic, I would test myself on their exam questions. By the time formal revision began, I’d burnt through every available past paper a dozen times. I recycled through them and refused to stop until I could account for every mark.
Finally, exam season arrived. Armed to the teeth with knowledge, I once again aggressively studied and repeated exam papers right up to the exam start. I went in to the exam halls already in-gear, itching to open that first page and start writing. As a consequence of repeating the first year exams, my schedule was constant, back to back, and exhausting.
Spending that summer waiting for results was emotionally draining. I had never felt so much anxiety and anticipation. Almost none of the Universities I had applied to had accepted me based on my earlier grades, so I had emailed the representative at my local University practically begging for a conditional offer, describing the extreme lengths I was taking to save my grades. Eventually, a representative at the University took a chance on me and offered a conditional offer with a BCC entry requirement.
Results day arrived.
I was up early, hardly having slept, and showered. My family bustled around the house getting ready for work. As I got out of the shower my phone buzzed… an email, from the University. I’d been accepted for my course and below were the details of my start. Even as I write this, tears well in my eyes at the memory. My hard work had paid off. I raced to tell my family and friends, and made my way to the college in the safe knowledge that I had at least achieved a B in one subject and a C in another. A slight worry had brewed in me, as I was not sure whether after such tremendous effort I would be happy with those grades. After all it would be a close reflection of my GCSE accomplishments, which had already proved undesirable. But still, I had got into my chosen course at University, and that is what ultimately mattered.
This time I opened my packet without friends around, who had already left a year earlier to start their degrees. I opened the packet and stared at the results.
I read them again. Then again. I had not merely met the universities requirements, and I had been just two marks away from an A* in Mathematics.
Elation after such a long and arduous year does not begin to define the feelings I had. I felt on top of the world, truly!
The mindset shift I underwent during that third year has underpinned every achievement since. At University, I was awarded a merit scholarship and graduated with first-class honours. I completed several internships before starting a career my younger self would never have dreamed possible.
That final year shaped the way that I built MathLab.
I did not improve because I discovered a hidden trick or technique, or had one lesson explained perfectly. I improved because I practised relentlessly, found the gaps in my understanding, sought help when I was stuck, and returned to the same ideas until they were second nature.
MathLab is designed to make that process available to anyone. It gives you a corpus of thousands of questions, a well defined sequence of lessons, practice, and challenges, and fully described solutions to every problem. It’s for everyone, whether you’re aiming for an A* or staring at a grade that makes you wonder if you belong in the subject at all.
I went from a U to an A. Your current grade is where you are starting, not where you have to finish.