Not a math person…

I was thinking about high school again (as my first year in college comes to a close). I realize that back then, I was comically bad at math. Even worse, my reputation seems to have traveled with me a state over to college.

It’s not that I was bad at math (that is, if you can bear that finding that 18 divided by 6 = 4 is not bad math)…I was just bad at calculations…and I still am. If I can latch on to a general theory or the rule behind a system, then things are a little better…but then I’ll make thousands of errors in application.

I wouldn’t say that I hated math back in school. I actually liked most of my math classes…until I got to the point (which always happened very quickly) when I couldn’t figure out the correct answer…one way or another. Sometimes, the theory I needed to use would escape me (or maybe I had never learned it)…other times, I just wouldn’t be able to calculate correctly. In these cases, I really was trying to do things right (no one wants to be frustrated and wrong), but…I guess…as some might say…I was just not a math person. Interesting factoid about me: every B on my otherwise beautiful transcript came from a math or math-like class (chemistry).

It’s funny. Math is supposed to be super logical…so someone who likes logical things should like math. Unfortunately, in my personal pain olympics, I’ve never found that to be true. I find that math is increasingly convoluted and illogical. Its rules are dreamed up by select oracles of autism with the penchant for revelation from the devil on how to make humankind suffer a little more (plz don’t sue me, numerous parties blasphemed just now). Maybe it started with my geometry class…whose teacher never used proofs (how do you to go through a geometry class without ever using a proof?!)…but somehow, since then, I’ve lacked this foundation for math logic that has never quite caught up to me. Things that should be logical don’t seem that way, as a result.

I loved my AP Calculus class, though. It was like a mutual struggle for most of us…my teacher know about the particular geometry teacher and her ill-begotten legacy (everyone in that town does, of course), and so he had taken it upon himself to get us up to scratch with the basics while teaching us the new things (it also helped that he taught a PSAT prep class for sophomores and juniors, so we were able to absorb from that too.) Come to think of it, my AP Calc teacher (also my AP Econ teacher) kicked butt. Also, his wife who was my AP English teacher. There was lots of awesomeness between them and it’ll be sad when they finally retire (which they keep prolonging, fortunately), because then I’ll know that every class that doesn’t have them just won’t be good enough.

Well…even though it was only Cal AB (there would not have been enough interest for a BC class, the school administration told us), I felt good about math. To be honest, I still thought I was hopelessly inferior in the subject…after all, I wasn’t a “math person,” and in some of my other organizations (Academic Decathlon, Panasonic Academic Challenge, quiz bowl in general), I was surrounded by guys and girls who could outrun me many times around the mathematical race track…but I was feeling better about things.

Then came that fateful AP test of 2007. The free response…ugh…brutal…we all thought we had failed. No doubt about it. But I was ok with it, I thought. After all, I wasn’t a math person.

I got a 5.

I had never gotten one on any of our class’s AP run-throughs, of course. I couldn’t quite believe my 5 on the real thing was official (except for the fact that this was the most official result I had ever gotten).

That was a roundabout way of getting to here: what’s the deal with being a “math person” or not? Can’t we be competent either way? Sure, I can’t solve most problems in my head (or on paper) with any reasonable accuracy, but I know how they should work theoretically. It is excruciatingly frustrating and I’d never want to live my life doing it (which is why I’d never become an engineer, but that’s another story), but I am not hopeless and helpless. The moral of this story, I suppose, is that we can’t let labels be our handicaps…we do need to capitalize on our strengths…this is true, but we can’t let or weakness atrophy into nubs.

P.S. Accounting is not about math. I don’t know where people started this, but I really want to punch the person who started this. I have to explain ad nauseum about how the little math that is in accounting is not very advanced and can be outsourced to computers anyway…