By amigoponc on Skatehive
It was 1968. At the time, I was a 13-year-old teenager with boundless energy, lofty dreams, and a natural aptitude for numbers that sometimes got me into trouble. I was studying at Secondary School Juan de Guroceago, a ‘Type C’ institution located in a neighbourhood called “Mario Briceño Iragorri”, a working-class area on the outskirts of Caracas, Venezuela. Although most people took two forms of transport to get there, I preferred to walk there and back; perhaps that daily exercise was what fuelled my audacity. The day Math made me daring In that second year of secondary school, my academic nemesis had a name: Professor Alemán. He was a man with a short temper and a pointed beard that seemed to accentuate his severity. My classmates feared him; I simply observed him. His teaching method was rigid, limited to following the CENAMEC (National Centre for the Improvement of Science Teaching) Guide to the letter. For him, what that book said was absolute truth, a kind of mathematical dogma.