One of the jobs I’ve had in my life was as a buyer where I had to keep a warehouse full of food. Grocery stores would then buy from my warehouse to fill their stores.People like you would go to the grocery stores and buy your fixins for dinner. Together we kept the economy going, when all we were really doing was feeding our faces. It was a really great job and one of the things I liked about the job was the math. This is frankly a stunning admission on my part, as my relationship with math has always been a rocky one at best.
Math was always showing up in the most unexpected places, like grammar and spelling.
“A Rat In The House May Eat The Ice Cream”
I think I was in second or third grade when I learned the above precious and obviously successful acronym. I also learned the valuable lesson of spelling the word arithmetic in it’s full proper form and not using it by it’s shorter nickname ‘Math’ until we were on better speaking terms, which was a long time coming. The acronym for Math could be “Makes All Things Happen” or my favorite “Mindless Adventures Through Hell”. The hell part was usually where I ended up with my ‘friend’ math.
Math popped up again one day while I was shopping. I was trying to figure out what 25% off was for a very pretty $10.00 blouse. My first thought was just a little off the shoulder, but the true answer was of course working with fractions.
$10.00 Blouse
25% discount
If 10% (which was usually a reasonable number I could figure out) was $1.00, then 20% would be $2.00 and 50% of $1.00 was $.50 then the total is $2.50 off of $10.00 and I had a blouse (not including tax) for $7.50. I know it’s not rocket science but it made me feel like I could actually do math in my head when I usually stared at it with disdain. On a chalkboard. In the front of a class. With tears running down my face. I should have had therapy regarding my math angst but eventually we came to terms. Eventually. To terms. yup.
In my senior year of college in my last trimester, I needed a math credit to graduate. I had taken all of the required math courses and barely passed and was retaking a Geometry class. A very basic Geometry class where most normal people would just show up for the tests, not even break a sweat during the test and then rush off to a game of racquetball. I labored for hours. It was not sinking in to my very thick skull. It came to the final, and the professor requested a meeting with me. The wonderful and very bright woman saw that I was failing in an epic fashion and knew that unless there was a miracle of sorts I would not graduate. Crap, every other class I had stellar grades. So Miss Geometry-teacher and I negotiated a way out of my mathematically impossible chance of graduating from college. She asked me the subjects that I excelled? Um, none really I changed my major three times and I’m HOPING to graduate with a General studies degree. I thought to myself but being the clever girl I am, I said outloud, writing and music. I could see the wheels turning in her pretty sweet head and me she challenged me with the following. Write a term paper on the life and times of Rene’ Descarte, the father of modern philosophy and the creator of analytical geometry. It will need to be 5 pages long with all the research goodies like footnotes and stuff. If you can pull this off, then I will give you a passing grade so you can graduate and get your sorry ass out of my college, is what I heard. But what she said out loud was, write this paper, have it to me by Friday, I will grade it over the weekend and we will meet on Monday to discuss the results.
I was back in the playoffs!!!! Not only was my graduation in the balance but a trip to Europe was teetering on the edge as well.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Gale said,
November 18, 2008 at 10:04 am
We are SO much from the same pea pod. My math skills in college still give me chills. Took me 3 times to get out of high school math, I made the deans list because this class was off the radar. Finally passed with a B – sailed through the next math class with an A. I rely on Quicken and a calculator.
Jeff said,
November 18, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Good for her for finding you an alternate way to pass math. I suck royally at it too.
Royce said,
November 19, 2008 at 8:09 am
It must be genetic. My Only success in math was in highschool algebra with Miss Grace, if the kids could get her talking about ANYthing at all, things were fine. My geometry class consisted of a great typewritten notebook that carried the day. My college courses did not require a math at that time but biology nearly killed me. I too, rely heavily on calculator and Turbo Tax.
Phil said,
November 20, 2008 at 6:30 am
If I’d had a math teacher that said, oh you might need this information in the future when trying to learn how to fix that equipment in the Navy, I just may have listened. I actually used geometry in one of my jobs, I was slow, man was I slow, but it finally came back to me. It’s all gone now though, thank God.
jody said,
November 20, 2008 at 10:43 am
My worst math experience was while enrolled at BSU. I had attended a community collage for 2 years in Fairfax VA and was on the deans list so felt pretty smart. It was very hands on, my studies were animal husbandry, we studied wildlife management then went out in the field and trapped animals, we studied casterating piglets then went out in the field and,,, well you get the picture.
Back to BSU, with such success at community collage I decided to study veterinary medicine. We had to take an aptitude test for trig. In front of the entire class the instructor told me I needed to go back to 8th grade math. That was an embarrassing day.
Kathy said,
November 22, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I think we were separated at birth. I could not (and still cannot) figure out Geometry to save my life. I had it in high school and all my classmates seemed to just get it. It was the only class I ever came close to failing and I was mortified. Somehow I pulled through and never forgot the experience.
I was the same way with Accounting in college. Very basic accounting. I saved it for my last requirement to graduate because I hated it so much. When I came home with the textbook, I put it on the kitchen counter, leafed through a few pages and then promptly burst into tears. My husband said “Now close that and go sit on the couch and stare at a wall. Crying will solve nothing.” I wound up miraculously acing the course, but only because I had the best professor who ever lived.
Now, if you can figure out why I sucked at those courses, but excelled at Trigonometry and Calculus, could ya let me know? I’ve never been able to figure that out.
I’m glad you were saved!
Vegas Princess said,
November 22, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Ugh. Math. I hate math. I am so not a math person. And Geometry was my nemisis in high school. But I learned how to do the quick percentage trick too. Helps me with tipping and discounts. Ever wonder why the nickname for arithmetic is math? I have.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. « Blah blah blog-o-licious said,
February 5, 2009 at 9:24 am
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