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If you're interested in reading anecdotes from dozens of genuinely smart people who were or are scared of math, you can visit this fascinating Metafilter thread

• araneae 17y ago
  "Why do elementary school teachers teach multiplication tables for 6 years and call that math?" Recently my mother told me a story of when I was in elementary, a teacher told my mother that while I was quite good in English in the like, I was bad at math. My mother (who likes math and is pretty good at it) got pissed off at the teacher and told her that she couldn't possibly know if I was good at math or not, because we weren't doing math. I actually did not ever learn my full multiplication tables, but I did learn techniques to get around not knowing them, and can know consequently multiply much larger numbers in my head than most other people. So I don't regret my hatred of memorization. And that might be behind it. The only thing I hated more than memorizing multiplication tables was memorizing poems, but there was very little of the latter in my education; much more of the former.