Number Cruncher

Since I first began working in the real world during the summer, I got a student planner as my calendar and have been getting student calendars ever since. They usually run from about July to the following August and are generally completely satisfactory.

Well, since we are nearing August, I have been marking off dates as my schedule becomes fuller and today I ran into the end of August. Only to find a bunch of pages of math formulas. The laws of cosines, geometry theorems, the whole shebang.

I started reading out of curiosity to see what I had forgotten since high school and quickly remembered that I had not just forgotten, I had most likely subconsciously pushed it out of my mind because it was such a traumatizing and horrifying experience.

I. hate. math.

I've hated math for as long as I can remember, but I don't think I've always hated it. I'm pretty sure that a couple of really horrible math teachers in jr. high and high school tainted my love of learning and made me despise math.

I mean really, you have to be a pretty good teacher to show kids how to do fractions and dissect triangles and not want to hide in the corner and sob quietly in the middle of the lesson. Some teachers should just not be teaching math, and I'm pretty sure I had all of them at one point or another.

To illustrate my point, take geometry. I love geometry. Weird, I know. I was good at geometry, even stranger. My geometry teacher had a "Wall of Fame" and I was constantly at the top. He even called me the "Goddess of Geometry" for a whole semester after I scored the highest on his midterm out of any student he had in all his years that he had been teaching at SHG.

Since I already know that math doesn't really come naturally to me, the only reason I can deduct for this kind of performance is that he was a good teacher. He wasn't overly friendly, nice, funny or anything like that. But he taught math in a very disciplined, organized way and explained everything very thoroughly. The examples we covered in class were very similar to the ones he put on the tests (another beef I have with math teachers- they spend weeks going over all these examples, which I study and feel like I know, then they completely throw you off with problems you've never even seen before on exams...how is that remotely fair/not frustrating?). And he was usually open to going over harder problems several times to make sure we understood.

If I had more teachers like that, I might have a little more love in my heart for math. Instead, I cringe when I need to add something and automatically reach for the calculator. No need to wreak more havoc on my beaten brain.

So there really is no particular reason for this post, except to vent my frustration and hatred for trig, calculus, algebra and even multiplication tables. Now that I'm a writer, I avoid all things numbers. And if you see numbers in my stories, you'll now know that when I wrote that, I didn't really have any idea what I was talking about...