American elementary school

I learned my times tables in UKG. Reflecting on my thought processes about the times tables is fun, because it was a thing I lorded over other students in the US where that was considered advanced work. When they finally introduced multiplication to us in the first grade, it was multimodal and interactive rather than rote: we were given small blocks and told to group them together in equal portions, to see the relationships between adding and mutiplying laid out in rectangular arrays. To me at the time, the activity seemed trite - a repetition of a pattern I already thought I understood. By this time I'd already forgotten, and had to relearn, the tables; but the arrogance of having known was well ingrained where the knowledge itself had been lost. relearning them, I hated them intensely - and then I didn't, because I knew them again.

When the blocks came out again, later (how much later? in my mind, it's "a unit" later - once we were done with one thing, which was decided for us, a new thing got given to us; in the grand children's cartoon tradition of "today we're going to", where time units outside of that hour and that day weren't quite considered our purview), they were there to show us how to divide: and I was mystified. I hadn't ever memorised this, I didn't know it in my bones and sing it to myself. We hit fractions at some point in the second or third grade, and I did not like them either, for a good long while - like telling left from right, there seemed to be no easy way to determine if one had got something right before the witnessing party caught one doing it wrong. I truly enjoyed rehearsing things. I enjoyed having the upper hand. I enjoyed being right. (Or, in what may be the more parsimonious explanation, I still liked doing repetitive things.)

My struggles with mathematics were of the type that did not look like struggles on the curve - on the contrary, I was learning to dislike the snesation of difficulty precisely because most things taught as math were easy for me well before my peers gained mastery.

On the other hand, English, from the outset, looked exactly as challenging to my school as it felt to me. The paltry three- and four-letter word vocabulary that I'd been building up, as a young Indian kindergartener in the nominal English medium of a middle class city school, didn't actually constitute enough of a grasp on English for it to be considered an acceptable medium of instruction in a coutnry of native speakers. I completed a third year of kindergarten while I got up to speed and undertook an ESL course. Most of this effort occurred at home, consonant with the classroom reading program.

This home course consisted of a package that arrived every month, contianing:

• four illustrated eight-page books, each with its own accompanying track on a cassette tape

• a workbook to solve in concert with the reading material

• phonics practice on the back of the books, each sound accompanied by a vocab word with that sound in it, that had been featured in the book.

Each successive instalment of these materials was greeted with greater enthusiasm. The moment the package arrived, I would take the house's portable cassette player, find a pencil, and immediately disappear for the next few hours to complete my first pass of the reading and tear through the workbook. I was perfectly able to read the books unassisted by the tapes from about month three; shortly thereafter, I outstripped the course's reading comprehension component altogether, and made further progress by making good use of class library time and the classroom bookshelf from that point forward. Nevertheless, I found solace and grounding in the ritual of the tapes. The gentle voice carefully pronouncing each word, placing emphases in their right-places in each phrase and sentence, retained a richness that wore smooth with repetition.

I eventually lent the books to a family friend (and received perhaps half of them back), but I never shared the tapes.