Over a cup of coffee with a friend, I had a “mathematical” talk. It all started with her elation after her young daughter’s success, a student of medicine now. This was enough to make her elated, one may think. Yet, it was the fact that her daughter had progressed in a field (medicine) that was far enough from a subject that she deeply detested, mathematics.

The mother’s grades in mathematics started out promisingly, only to become elusive as she progressed to high school. She said that it made her hate everything about school. The idea of math tests sounds nightmarish to her now.

That, in its turn, took me back to my high school days. After finishing the eighth grade, we enrolled at Black Lion. It was a year the revolutionary fervour started to subside and many youths returned to school. The small-sized school was forced to go three regular shifts to accommodate the tide of almost all ninth-grade students. Each classroom was crammed to its utmost.

Just as we started the semester, to our dismay, our mathematics teacher gave us a test. The results were grim for many of us. As he finished disclosing the results, based on our address from a list he held, he firmly declared that the overall result corresponded to where we lived. Almost all who did well came from the southern direction of our school. Though dismayed with his assertion at first, it did not take us a while to figure out why exactly those students did better.

It was because they were from Felege Yordanos and Agazian, two private elementary schools nationalised after the Ethiopian revolution. Yet, it was only the ownership that changed hands, not hearts. The two ex-owners were retained as directors of the schools. It was crystal clear that students from these schools had a strong attachment to mathematics. It also built their mindset to follow up with confidence the other subjects.

For the rest of us, it was not that easy. It was no different for me as I had sought to form friendships with backbenchers. It was not easy to win the hearts of back-seating friends, many of them our age seniors.