If a foreign government ever kidnapped me, duct-taped me to a chair, and threatened to torture me unless I revealed certain secrets which would imperil everyone in the Unite States, the foreign agents wouldn’t have to start hacking off my fingers or clamping electrodes onto various tender areas of my body. If they wanted me to tell everything I knew, without a second’s hesitation, they would just have to make me try and do math.
On my SATs, the discrepency between my Math scores and my Verbal scores was so great that the testing organization questioned the result. It was as if while I’d personally taken the Verbal portion, a raccoon had taken the Math.
When I was looking on Wikepedia to see if there was a word for an all-pervasive fear of math, the entry began with a discussion of math anxiety, which is caused by just thinking about math. I found this so upsetting that I couldn’t finish reading the rest of the entry. Although as far as I could tell, there is no technical or Latin term for this condition. Which made me feel even more pathetic. It’s as if Wikepedia informed me, “Oh, we believe the word you’re looking for is STUPID.”
My Dad was a Math major and he was incredibly kind and patient, as he tried to very slowly and methodically walk me through, say, geometry. He would ask me something like, “So if B equals C-squared, and then we carry the 12, the result would be…?” I would stare at him, as if I was a dog waiting to hear a familiar word, like “leash” or “food.” There might be a micro-second when I actually grasped what a theorem was, but then that revelation would vanish, never to return. My Dad refused to give up, even when I would beg him to hit me in the head with a crowbar, because it might help.
It’s true and everyone knows it: as an adult, you will never need math. There will always be someone nearby, often someone with a computer, who can do fractions. One of the many reasons why I love my partner John is that, at a restaurant, he can always calculate the correct tip.
Feminists became justifiably outraged when a Barbie doll was once manufactured with a microchip which said, among other things, “Math is hard.” BARBIE WAS RIGHT.
