ME AND MATH

It’s tax time again.  The gal from our accountant’s office just called to confirm our date … so romantic – Valentine’s Day.  If I play my cards just right, and everything adds up, we may celebrate by going out for lunch.  I mean, we’ll already be in town and everything.

But that’s the least of my worries at the moment.  First I have to ‘do the books’.  I haven’t touched them since this time last year when I swore a solemn oath to never let the job slide for a whole year ever again.  I suck at solemn oaths.

I’ll tell you what else I suck at.  Anything to do with numbers.  Give me letters and I will write you a story, or a letter, or even a book.  But give me numbers and the result is anxiety and self doubt and rumpled paper made grungy by sweaty palms.

Personally I blame Miss Seagle, my first grade teacher.  Or maybe it was more of a wide spread, institutional thing.  Maybe all Grade one teachers distributed mammoth sheets of addition questions, and held up their evil stop watches, commanding all the tender innocents in their charge to do a week’s work in two minutes, or less. 

In our classroom everyone else would snap to work.  I would freeze in my tracks.  Numbers were hard enough, but numbers under pressure?  I would stare in awe of my friends’ ability to scribble down answers on their papers while I sat there unsure of which hand I was supposed to hold my pencil in.  I remember Judy Dangstorp crying because she didn’t get 100%.  Her bar was obviously much much higher than mine – my goal was to be at least halfway down the page before Miss Seagle told us to put our pencils down.  Getting the right answers was a whole other ordeal.

Given enough time, though, my arithmetic education did progress.  Grades 1 and 2 kept up the repetition and slowly built up my confidence.  “I can do this!” I would tell myself.  If it didn’t get any harder I was going to be fine.  Then came Grade 3.  After one week of addition and subtraction review Mrs. Leiter sat us all down and told us of the magic of multiplication and division.  She seemed quite excited about it, bless her soul.  I felt deceived.  After all my hard work had paid off and I had mastered ‘plusses and minuses’  I was being ‘rewarded’ with something even harder.

They did it to me again in Grade 6 with geometry and in Grade 7 with algebra.  Who knew that was even a word?  “Al – ge – bra” with all its problems and equations and sneaking in letters that masqueraded as part of the solutions we were supposed to find. 

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Grade 10 threw two more classes at me  – chemistry and physics.  Both used the same alien language.  When would it ever end?

Apparently not in Grade 11 when Mr. Johnson introduced us to trigonometry with its sines and cosines and tangents – the results of an unholy marriage between algebra and geometry.

The day I heard the words ‘quantum physics’ blowing in the wind I decided marriage and child rearing was the easy way out.

And look at me go!  Decades later I find myself still doing arithmetic under the gun.  A whole year’s worth, and eight days to do it.  It’s like I can still hear Miss Seagle’s stop watch … tick tock tick tock.