"That Part of My Brain Just Doesn't Work"

When I first started reading Mike Rose's essay "I Just Wanna Be Average", I didn't really feel like I could relate because I was home-schooled. I never had classmates who cut up or teachers who didn't care because I was the only student and my mother was my teacher.

Once I got further into the story, I began to think about my college career up until now. I was reminded of my struggle last semester in Math 121 when he wrote,

"The particulars will vary, but in essence this is what a number of students go through, especially those in so-called remedial classes. They open their textbooks and see once again the familiar and impenetrable formulas and diagrams and terms that have stumped them for years. There is no excitement here. No excitement. Regardless of what the teacher says, this is not a new challenge. There is, rather, embarrassment and frustration and, not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again of long-standing inadequacies. No wonder so many students finally attribute their difficulties to something inborn, organic: “That part of my brain just doesn’t work.” Given the troubling histories many of these students have, it’s miraculous that any of them can lift the shroud of hopelessness sufficiently to make deliverance from these classes possible" (pg. 323-324)

I have always struggled with anything above Algebra I and that class just made me feel worse about math. So I tuned it out and slept most of the time. As a result, I barely passed with a D.

There is a lot of truth in that paragraph.

What were some of your reactions to that and similar paragraphs?