missed calculations

Interesting article this weekend in the Globe and Mail about scientists studying dyscalculia, a disorder or disability that affects some children's comprehension of arithmetic, the way dyslexia affects some in their ability to read. Fascinating stuff, and it makes you hopeful that educators will figure out a way to deal with innumeracy before the kids grow up and try to fill out their tax form.

I did not ever suffer from dyscalculia, but I got sidetracked all the same on my way to "realizing my potential" in numberland, many successful Sudokus later notwithstanding. When I was young, though I didn't have miles of snow to walk through, I did subscribe to the idea that girls don't like math. This had nothing to do with the evidence in front of me, it was just typical 50s/60s nonsense. (It's changed now, and the popular culture has the boys striving to be the slackers, but back in the 50s and 60s it was the girls and women who were the comic relief.)

At the time, I was hazy on what my ideas about feminism (or women's lib, a nice, dismissive term) actually were. It's a long process, figuring out your own life, and the society you've landed in. I certainly didn't put it together (add it up) that I was born with an aptitude for numbers as well as words, and should (could!) use both. I think there was also an element of rebellious rejection of my father, the math teacher. He was not an easy man, close up. Or across town, either. He left our mother, and consequently us (except for weekends and holidays) very early on; quite the trendsetter back then. Irony of course: I can't tell you how many of his former students I've run into who tell me what a fantastic math teacher he was, and more irony; I never had a decent one myself.

It's too bad, because a teacher even remotely as good as the one my father's students described, would have made a big difference to me. While I remember complete joy in puzzling stuff out when I was young, I don't remember it having much to do with school. I've one crystal memory of a teacher pouring water on me though, in quite the wet-blanket moment. I was excited, energized by some number factoid my mother had explained to me, and couldn't wait to tell my teacher this revelation. She dismissed it; I can still feel the letdown as my shoulders sagged. Maybe because she hadn't thought of it first, or maybe because it wasn't in her lesson plan; I have no idea. (My mother could have taught me too, if she hadn't been slogging off to work every day, Head Teller in a bank where she got to train her managers, speaking of feminism. She used to enjoy getting Scientific American for the math puzzles. I thought that was pretty cool. Still, I thought girls didn't like math. Figure that puzzle out.)

High school is supposed to be the greatest time, blah, blah, blah. As my son said to me, when his time came: They lied. I remember my first math teacher in Grade 8. She was a kindly old woman (old to my eyes). Each class she'd half-heartedly cover a bit of something or other, and then she'd read to us; I think it was Journey to the Center of the Earth (which I'd already read). It was excruciatingly tedious. I don't remember the Grade 9 teacher at all, but I remember the Algebra textbook. I'd work out each homework problem as the teacher worked his way around the class the day we were supposed to have it done, just in case he (I think it was a he) called on me. I never actually did the work at home.

In Grade 10 it was Geometry and the teacher was hopeless. (I know that current curriculum is completely different; I'd be clueless now, sigh. At first :) Yet I must have understood him, because everyone around me kept asking me to explain what he'd just said. Then Grade 11, oh man, I better not say too much, as it might be libelous. I remember feeling such contempt for the guy, it was hard to sit through a class. I got As that year, along with lousy marks for work habits. Which is fair enough. I didn't have an industrious bone in my body, or maybe I should say I didn't have an inspired bone in my body.

In spite of all this, I still meant to take Math 12, along with Physics 12, because that's what my brother had taken, but my "guidance" counselor suggested that sounded like a lot of work. (She was no feminist, was she? Oh the sixties, don't you miss them?) Well, as it happens I was a lazy and miserable teenager, and I thought, yikes, work! so of course I took Graphic Arts and Sewing instead. Which is not to slag the usefulness of either of those courses either, but I already knew how to sew (and anyway, I had two, not one, but two, sewing classes, so could have spared the block). Graphic Arts was great though, because the teacher turned us on to Pink Floyd.

I wanted to go to university (did go) but in that single, thoughtless moment, the counselor steered me away from half my options. It's that easy to accomplish with the young and directionless, and I don't thank her.

Where were my parents? you ask. Ah, we weren't one of those kinds of families. Mom was at work, and Dad didn't live with us (and also had a misogynistic bias to match that counselor's myopia, I'm afraid. He said to me once about a former student of his whom I'd met: "She wasn't a bad math student, for a girl." Don't tell his former students.).

No, I was pretty much on my own figuring out the path to here. Had to finally do some homework and make some corrections, but things are adding up pretty well. (Are you groaning yet?)

Remember slide rule's? Math 12 would have unlocked this one's mysteries for me.