Woman Who Never Learned to Multiply or Divide in School Now Tries to Learn as Adult

If you've worked in the education system, then you'll know students can often be passed upwards to higher grades, even if they haven't demonstrated a mastery of their current grade level skills.

Aaliyah Marais (@aaliyahmarais) reveals that this happened to her after she could never quite get the concepts behind multiplication and division.

Aaliyah's video begins with her looking off-camera as someone can be heard speaking in the background. She writes in a text overlay of her video: "One day in 3rd grade my teacher showed the class how to divide and multiply."

In a follow-up on-screen caption, she adds: "For whatever reason by the end of the day I still didn't have it down. Everyone moved on to long division, multiplication, & algebra. I snuck through the cracks because I multiplied in my head using addition."

At this point in the clip, it's evident that Aaliyah is recording herself during a session with a teacher who is explaining the basis of multiplication and division to her. The social media user was determined to get to the bottom of the lesson that's been eluding her for so long.

She says to the instructor: "OK so you're multiplying it by how many times it could go." It sounds like the teacher affirms her inquiry into how multiplication functions.

Aaliyah continues to recall memories of her math lessons in school, including a unique reward at the end of the school year.

"I remember for every timed multiplication or division test we got 100% on — we would get a topping for our ice cream sundaes at our end-of-unit party."

Cutting back to her in the video, she can heard asking her teacher how it's possible for someone to "remember all these steps?"

While her friends were enjoying the kind of sundae you'd expect to see in the dinner scene of Hook, her own dessert looked much less busy and inundated with goodies. This was due to the difficulty she had in grasping particular mathematical concepts.

"The day the party came I watched the teacher call up the names of the students who earned 5 ice cream toppings... 4 etc...and lastly my name was called and I was the only one who was just allowed to have one singular scoop of vanilla ice cream."

Her attitude towards mathematics didn't improve throughout her academic career, either. Aaliyah stated that she outright refused to participate in these assessments, even state exams, because of her negative ice cream experiences.

As a result, she'd constantly get sent to the principal's office and find herself in trouble. Teachers ultimately gave up on her as they became much too tired to argue with her to care more about her education.

It's not like Aaliyah was a bad student, either. As her video progressed she said that she would often get straight A's with occasional B grades in every subject other than math. In that particular area of study, she was always left with an "i" — incomplete.

"When high school came around, I failed math every single year," she wrote, adding that even though her teachers knew there was "something wrong" they'd let her "sleep during class" and while other students received tests they were expected to take, they'd skip over her.

According to Aaliyah, she never took a state-issued educational assessment such as the SAT or ACT.

Although she was clearly stressed by the fact she never learned how to properly multiply and divide throughout her educational career, she ended up deciding that it was better late than never.

Aaliyah said that she always wondered if parents actually did help their kids with their homework — which is the type of stuff she'd see on TV shows.

And as it turns out, she did end up getting the tutor she never had after penning a TikTok where she revealed she never learned multiplication or division.

She was met with predictable comments from folks, who couldn't seem to believe she didn't know how to properly solve 5x5 or 10x10.

Maybe these remarks stayed with her, or maybe posting about her issue was a way of her opening up to the possibility of finally learning.

That's because she was at a group gathering, she overheard someone mention that they were interested in teaching math to young children. Upon hearing this, she decided to jump at what seemed like a golden opportunity to finally learn and told the person that she never grasped her multiplication and division tables.

Aaliyah shared that there was another impetus for her wanting to learn this basic math concept: without it, she can't legally become a nurse.

She said that the man in the group sat with her for an extra 25 minutes at the end of the session. She writes that she isn't sure the lesson is going to stick with her and while she's going to try her "absolute best" to finally learn it that if she can't, she'll transition to "something else" instead.

She capped off her video with a final message that can honestly be applied to any person who is going after a dream that is rife with obstacles that are seemingly impossible to conquer.

"I decided I would rather try and fail, rather than being stagnant my entire life because I didn't try hard enough," she writes.