The Fight Against Triangles by Sarah

The Fight Against Triangles by Sarah - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

I have hated learning about triangles since the third grade. While this might seem like a dramatic statement, some of my earliest memories in school were of me fighting the ST Math penguin any time a triangle showed up on my computer screen. I could never tell the difference between an isosceles or scalene triangle and looking at angles in a triangle made my head spin. So I was in utter dismay when I learned in 9th grade I had to take a geometry class. While at first I reserved hope that it would mainly be focused on other shapes, I quickly learned the main focus was going to be on triangles. In the beginning it was not as bad as I thought it would be. The main focus was on the basics such as the area of a triangle and the pythagorean theorem. However, the moment I was introduced to triangle proofs I knew it was going to be a long battle. It felt like I was staring at an archaic ruin, convinced my teacher had to have made it up as some cruel prank. I couldn’t even understand the premise of it. I would just point at the answer and say that it’s already solved and to move on. The idea that understanding how an answer was gotten could be just as important as the answer itself went straight over my head. I spent hours at night just staring at these questions trying to understand them as I did my homework. The premise of proofs along with the diagram of triangles made it my nightmare of a math topic. However, after asking my classmates and watching youtube videos of the topic I slowly felt myself begin to understand how to do them. Rather than only viewing it as a stupid waste of time that would only matter for a class, I began to view them as a puzzle to solve. It taught me the value of not just answering a question but understanding how the question was answered.