Name: Kritan Baniya

The part of Tan’s essay that resonates with me the most is the part where she talks about her grades in school. She mentions how although her English grades weren’t the worst, they weren’t the best, while in Math and Science, she had way better grades. I resonate with this the most because I’ve had the exact same experience throughout my school years.

The author mentions how math is “precise”, there is only right or wrong, and nothing in between. There is no opinions, feelings, preference, or perspective in math, it either is or it is not. I feel that this is why I’ve always been way better at math than I’ve ever been in English. Although there is a rubric, I’ve always felt that my grade on my writings always depended on the teacher’s opinion on various things, their preferences, and the way they know English. What one person thought was good writing could be horrible to another. This is not the case with Math, two different graders can’t give different grades to the same math question and answers, someone would have had to be wrong, but that’s not the case for English, both graders could be correct. In my opinion, I think this is because English could be taught in different ways which lead to different answers, however, although math can be taught with different techniques, they always lead to one single correct answer. The author mentions fill-in-the-blank questions, which I have encountered, but another one that we all have dealt with a lot more is multiple choice questions. Some people like multiple choice question better because one of the answers is correct and you always have a 1 in 3/4/5 chance of getting it correct. I disliked them even more, they include 1 or 2 options which is obviously wrong, and always 2 options which are very close and could be 50-50, or both which are right, but you would have to get with is the more right answer. Again, this is not the case with math because the difference between the right and wrong answer is black and white. However, I think some people would not resonate with this particular part of Tan’s essay because the exact reason I find English tougher and Math easier can be the exact reason someone else finds Math tougher than English easier, it depends on the specific person.