I am the youngest child in my family. However, when my elder cousin was born, her parents were living with us. It was exciting and such a joy to have a newborn in the house.
When my cousin was three, her little family moved a block away with my grandma. Each morning grandma would come visit with her and stay for lunch. One Saturday, they did not turn up. By ten o'clock mom sent me over with some freshly cooked braised pork to check on them. You could blow me over with a feather, I saw my cousin sitting on a 6-inch plastic seat on a normal dinner chair. She was being tutored in Arithmetic. My aunt shrugged and said she did all she could, but my cousin still could not comprehend addition and subtraction. It was time to bring in an experienced teacher to help.
Tutoring a pre-school child was unheard of in the early seventies. Around that time I started tutoring an 11-year-old boy in English. It was a close-to-impossible task, as I taught and retaught simple vocabulary and tenses week after week. I was 13 years old that year. Even at that time I realised a person may be good at some things but quite slow in others. My pupil was slow in picking up English but good in Math and Science taught in Chinese. Perhaps it was a good idea to start early. After all, family yarns credited me with the ability to count up to 100 coconut sweets accurately at age three. It was perfectly reasonable to expect my cousin to be able to add single digits at the age of three.
Half a century has passed. Looking back, my cousin was a most fortunate little girl. Her mum had actually implemented early intervention. Chances were nobody did call her stupid nor laugh at her weakness in arithmetic. Truly she never excelled in maths, but she did not fail. She dropped the subject as soon as she could.
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