Mathumatiks

I will never understand people like my Uncle Bruce or Burt. How can anyone thrive on math? I mean, some people really enjoy it. I am not sure I ever will. When my Uncle Bruce was tutoring me in math, he said that he would teach me to love math.

He failed. I don't love math. But I suppose it isn't too horrible, either. That's an improvement.

I'm now tutoring Josie in math. Who, besides Ms. Horton, would ever have believed that I would tutor anyone in math?

Ms. Horton is famous in my books for saying one of the funniest things about math I've ever heard. I suppose I was kind of her "teacher's pet" simply because I am a perfectionist and so, although I don't feel I am very talented in mathematics, I usually got the best grade in the class because I worked hard. I found it rather humorous that she nominated me to be "student of the week" for the math department two times in one semester. I found it more humorous the day she said to me,

"You love math, I can tell."

"I don't love math," I told her.

"But you always do so well..." Then she tried to convince me that becoming a math teacher was my calling in life.

It's not my calling in life, I assure you. I dropped her class at the end of that semester and picked up an art class. I really am not very good at math and so I have to work really hard at it. This would be more enjoyable if it was something that was actually entertaining, like dancing. I'm not a very talented dancer either, but at least I enjoy practicing it. When's the last time anyone's ever said, "Hey, let's go do some crazy math problems tonight!" I've never heard that, but I have heard, "Let's go dancing tonight!" Thus we see that dancing is more enjoyable for me than math. Learning foreign languages and going through labor are also quite intensive, but I enjoy them both more than doing math.

"You are good at math," Andrew told me when I told him that story.

"Not really," I said, "I have to work really hard at it and it isn't fun. I am much better at writing than I am at math."

"And that's why we don't have a math blog," quipped Andrew.

When I was in grade 9, I took math through the ADLC (Alberta Distance Learning Center). I was struggling at first because I'm not very good at math, but I am a perfectionist so with a little tutoring from David and some long hours put into my math problems my grades started to improve. Toward the end of the school year, I was getting 100% on nearly every assignment, a marked improvement compared with the 60-80% I had been getting at the beginning of the year.

One day I got a letter from my teacher written furiously at the top of one of my assignments:

Your answers are looking more and more like the answers in the back of the book. I hope you are not cheating because exams, and life, will demand it.

I was utterly offended. I was working so hard to solve each problem and when I started to get them right my teacher accused me of cheating. I suppose it was too difficult for him to put A and B together to come to the conclusion that my answers were looking more and more like the ones in the back of the book because I was getting more and more of them right on a more consistent basis.

Luckily we have to take provincial exams every three years in Alberta and grade 9 was one of those years. I scored in the top 10% on the math exam. So I proved "it" on the exam and now I guess I'm proving it in life because, frankly, I used algebra and the order of operations more today as I helped Josie than I have since I took that exam.

She's a handful. She really knows her stuff when she's in a good mood, but once her mood slips (and slip it will since she's thirteen) she starts getting a little mouthy.

"Alright, what's 7 x 3?" I quiz her, as this is the next step in the problem.

"37," she answers snappily.

"Uh, no, it's actually not."

"Fine, 82."

"Come on."

"Uny-un."

"What?"

"I said...uny-un."

"Josieeeeee..."

"Twenty-one! Urghhhh..."

And that is how it took us about five hours to go through twelve pages of math. That's about the average amount of time I spent doing my college algebra homework everyday (with the good graces of the teacher, I pulled through that class). Josie and I both lost our tempers after a while and so took a break. We had lunch, I showered, Josie played with the baby and then we hit the books again. Remarkably enough, Josie made an amazing recovery and remembered how to do math. She got a 94% on her first assignment.

"I hate math," she kept telling me and I had to resist using the phrase Mrs. Weston used every time someone in my geometry class cursed math that way,

"Well, maybe it's not too fond of you, either."