Math Hates Me

But for a minute there we were like “this”

I’m a word person in a numbers world.

From my first ever arithmetic classes in grade school, I was seized with panic. None of it scanned. Gym class was a nightmare on many levels not least of which was trying to open a combination lock. Classes, where we had to figure out how to make change in a mock supermarket, were agony and forget it when I’d get called to the blackboard to work out a problem. I’d literally stand there shaking, facing the incomprehensible marks on the board until the teacher would give up on me.

Doing math homework was miserable for me and for my poor parents who had no idea what to do with this “new math”. I’d sit for hours at the dining room table, head down, filled with confusion.

Somehow I muddled through getting Cs and Ds on anything math-related until making it to the last two years of high school when I fled to the newly opened vocational school, signing up for two years of commercial art. There I discovered that I could work with fractions when cutting mats for my artwork. That was kind of cool, but faced with any page of numbers, equations, word problem (the worst!) and I was reduced to complete confusion again.

A word about high school in the latter quarter of the last century

It was not ok to be smart, at least not in our part of Ohio.

It was especially dicey for the guys who would be mercilessly bullied and even beaten up for letting the other lunkheads see that they understood algebra or, God help them, calculus. I understood quickly that to be smart, even as a girl, was to call unwanted attention to myself so my innate confusion in the face of math never was resolved. I was also so hopeless in French class that Mrs. Ulrich allowed me to drop the course, something she said she’d never done before.

Go me!

This all changed in college where being smart was a good thing; it was rewarded and I vaulted to the head of every class. Let’s note that I was attending a state university at the start of my college career and all it took to maintain a 4.0 gpa was to do the assigned reading, hand in papers on time, and show up to class and do reasonably well on exams.

Then I hit the math wall

Like the rest of the English majors, I had to sign up for remedial algebra, a pass/fail course that (thankfully) would not affect my gpa. Ok, if I had to do it I would but I sat there the first day mired in gloom and panic.

The professor was a Ukrainian woman who was my first mathphile. This professor truly loved everything about mathematics and knew that her freaked out little charges would, too, if they just relaxed a little. The woman was a genius at explaining algebraic concepts in ten different ways. With infinite patience, she would start over and over until lights began going on in our thick, resistant heads.

I can still remember the sudden joy that coursed through me when I solved an equation and illustrated it on a graph without help.

I got it!

I understood algebra and our professor was right; it was beautiful. It was a precise and elegant language that never altered its truth. I reveled in my newfound power to “do math”. I never would have believed it was possible until this patient woman held my hand and walked me through what had been a dark and threatening forest.

Whose idea was this to transfer to Columbia University?

Oh, right, that was all my idea, wasn’t it?

But I was ready. Right? Sure I was. I didn’t just jump into this move. I got help and took all the right steps to make it happen. When I sat in the orientation that first semester, Spring 2001, watching the snow fall on Joseph Pulitzer’s name on the cornerstone of the Journalism School, I knew I was in the right place.

And then, there it was, remedial algebra again. That earlier class I’d taken was a pass/fail course so it didn’t count and the logic course I’d taken to satisfy the math requirement didn’t count at Columbia. It was considered philosophy, not math, and so I found myself back in a class of nervous English and Drama majors.

But I was fine. I knew how to do this now, right?

Wrong

The young man teaching this class was a Russian teaching assistant who really should have been teaching Physics majors, not a bunch of mathphobes. I went into my first day in that class feeling confident and ready. I reeled out two hours later completely at sea.

What on earth was that guy talking about?

Unlike my professor back at Cleveland State University, this young man only seemed to have one way to explain each concept he introduced. When we gazed back at him blankly he’d simply repeat that concept, word for word, but louder. Over and over until he was practically yelling. I couldn’t understand what had happened and immediately signed up for tutoring. The earnest young Barnard girl did her best but it had all morphed back into unintelligible gibberish to me.

I still remember sitting in that classroom with tears streaming down my face. I was that lost.

After the mid-term, our young teacher offered us the opportunity to simply toss the exam because only two people in the class had passed. If we’d agree to it, he was prepared to let us take it over right there as an open-book exam. Even then I was one of seven or eight students who still failed that mid-term.

I was that lost.

I worked with my tutor and agonized over homework nightly. I read and studied and cried and prayed and just barely passed the final exam. But pass it I did and I’ve never looked back.

Whatever secret and beautiful language it was that my professor back in Ohio taught me is lost. I know that there is a hidden beauty in algebra and other mathematics but it’s a closed door to me. I’ll never forget, however, that once upon a time I was able to easily swing that door open and walk freely, confidently in the world of numbers.

That has to be enough.

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