Weapons of Math Instruction

I won't even try Sudoku, that game that is replacing the crossword puzzle in some newspapers. I know that it's not really about numbers or math; we could put letters or colored dots or the faces of pop stars in there, but the numbers intimidate me. The whole thing reminds me of a seventh-grade extra credit problem, and I find it to be entirely too taxing.

Numbers scare the shit out of me. I'm one of those people who has to distract others from noticing that I'm having trouble with a simple subtraction or claim that I am having an unusual "brain freeze" that is preventing me from quickly adding two numbers that don't end in zero or five. Or I'll say, "I know this is easy, but I just have to punch it into the calculator so I don't make a careless mistake." The other day I was getting change back, and I was almost sure it wasn't the right amount, but I have embarrassed myself in the past by saying something when it turns out they were right. So I studied the cashier's face, and when her hesitation suggested that she thought she might be wrong, I said, "I think I should be getting some more back." I coulda been shorted almost ten bucks.

Curiously, I am pretty good at statistics, I think because the nature of it gives me a concept to hang the numbers on. I did almost fail a stats class in grad school, but that was related to a series of anaphylactic shock episodes and sexual harassment by the teaching assistant, not my inability to create degrees-of-freedom equations for SBF p-q split-plot factorial experimental designs. Well, maybe a little of that. Regardless, I'm not on the level of a professional statistican by any means, but in college, I was one of five people in a class of 600 that got an A+ in Stats 402. The professor invited the five of us to dinner; unfortunately, it is not just math that I have a problem with. I transpose numbers constantly, and I wrote down her phone number incorrectly. Transposition means that I must be vigilant in work situations. It is not that I work particularly slowly, as I have been accused; I am triple-checking to conceal my learning disability, dammit. Please pity and patronize me by pretending not to notice, okay?

My algebra teacher had very sensitively informed me that I would not get anywhere in life because I couldn't do algebra. So I had an algebra tutor my freshman year of high school. His name was Rudy and he was a college sophomore at Michigan Tech, an engineering school where people go to get fat. There is nothing to do in Houghton, MI except eat, drink, and pass out drunk in snowbanks. Anyway, Rudy was pretty cute, for a guy named Rudy. My mom was the secretary at the university's Catholic church, which has the coolest name: St. Albert the Great. They called it St. Al's for short, which always made me feel like I was going to church at that diner from Happy Days. He (Rudy, not St. Al) attended services there, and he offered to tutor me when my mom told him about my algebra woes. We had our tutoring sessions in the church basement, and I think that perhaps my mother chose this environment in hopes of divine intervention. After all, Jesus was pretty good at multiplication, at least when you put it in the context of loaves and fishes.

Unfortunately for Rudy, I was a spaz when I was 14, and he had no idea just what he was getting into. I interrupted him a lot because I get giddy when I'm anxious. I would stubbornly claim that an equation would remain unbalanced until the numbers on the left took their lithium. It was an affront to his Catholic sensibilties when I made jokes about polynomials being much more sexually open than binomials, and he hated it when I informed him that radical numbers were adherents to the philosophy of Che Guevara. What he found particularly irksome was when I called him "Rudy-Toot-Tutor."

I think he was exceedingly relieved when I determined that the math part of my brain was broken, and I quit attending sessions in favor of watching "Tiny Toons" after school. However, I found the rich brat character Montana Max intimidating because I figured he must be really good at balancing a check book. Fortunately, Hamton Pig, the "tiny" version of Porky Pig, was a stutterer, and that made me feel better about my own developmental difficulties. I managed, somehow, to pass algebra, but the verdict is still out on whether or not I am doing something with my life. And geometry was a-whole-nuther story. Part of my difficulty in that, though, was that the geometry teacher whistled his "esses," and the entire week we covered the "Side-Side-Side Symmetry Theorem," I had an excruciating headache.

Incidentally, whenever I hear the phrase "Axis of Evil" in relation to world politics, I immediately remember that I found it impossible to calculate simple slopes on an x,y graph. But I don't feel very bad, because it probably reminds President Bush of that, too. It's probably the only issue on which we can find common understanding.