My dad made me hate maths for most of my school years. In secondary school I was generally alright at maths, but really slow at these basic equation speed tests that we did. Because of that my teacher gave me extra maths homework to try and get faster. When my dad inevitably found out that I was getting extra maths work he made a point to sit down with me and go over it. Sounds good so far right? Well my dad would quickly get bored of doing an 8 year olds maths homework, and would start making his own maths questions to ask me. I'm sure they seemed very simple to him, but they were much harder than what I was doing at school and often involved things that I hadn't even learned yet, so I could never answer them. Every time I couldn't answer a question he would get more and more frustrated and disappointed, and I would get more and more upset.

After a few months of this my maths homework had degenerated to the point where I was on the verge of tears when I received it because I knew dad would do his questions with me, and he was getting angry and sometimes shouting at me when I couldn't answer them. It came to a head when one night he yelled "you should be able to do all of this, I think you might just be stupid!", dragged me off and spanked me, sent me to bed early, and then the next day enrolled me in a maths tutoring place that specialized in children with learning disabilities. The entire time this was going on I was in the top half of my class in maths (and ended up doing well in the tutoring too) with my only big weakness being the basic equation speed tests, but I dreaded doing maths and would try anything to get out of doing it because I thought I was too stupid for it.

Eventually my dads interest in my maths dropped off and he stopped going over the homework with me, but I was still convinced that I was somehow disabled when it came to maths and I absolutely hated doing it. I stopped paying attention in class, stopped doing my homework, made only a token effort at tutoring because I liked the lady that ran it, and so my grades began to drop. My dad just said my grades had always been bad (they hadn't, I saw my old report cards at new years) and I needed to work harder, and my bad grades just reinforced my low opinion of my maths skills and made me hate maths more. This started a vicious cycle of unhappiness and low grades that I only broke out of in the last couple of years of college (high school). I'm still really pissed off at my dad for that, he always tried to be a good parent but just didn't have the patience to deal with my sister and I when we were young so he would often try and push us too hard and be disappointed when we failed. Most of the time it was pretty harmless, but the whole maths episode really fucked with me when I was at school. And it was all over a bit of extra homework that was meant to help me.