Math is haaaard.

2003-09-11 at 8:47 p.m.

"What are you going back to school for?" asked Jessica, one of my new co-workers.

"To be a high school math teacher."

"Because you... hate yourself?" she asked with her eyebrows raised.

This is a theme. Responses range from "Um. Oh." to "You must be a sadist. Or a masochist. Or, I suppose, both." Both of which I have gotten in the past forty-eight hours. (This is what happens when you start a new job. It becomes imperative to encapsulate your personality, goals, and life into about four sentences. 1. Moved here from Chicago a year ago. 2. Because husband got a job here. 3. No permanent job since moving here. 4. But going back to school hopefully next year--assuming I get accepted. Done. Gives enough information to ask questions or not, as desired, but absolves me of having to give more information if I don't want to.)

(Also clearly not exactly four sentences. Hence why I'm not trying to be a high school English teacher.)

And it all gets tied up together. I need to be able to coherently and persuasively state why I want to be a high school math teacher in one to three pages--convincingly enough to ensure my acceptance--and I find myself tongue-tied when other-wise well-meaning people greet my neutral statement with an obvious horror.

Mostly? It just makes me sad. And that, I really can't explain.

But of course I'll try.

Return to school as I have over the last term has reminded me how much I really like math. That sounds twisted even as I write this--but the fact that it does sound twisted and yet I still enjoy it makes me examine why it sounds twisted. Why is there almost no subject as universally reviled as math? What has math ever done to anyone?

People, that was rhetorical. Or rather, that's what I'm trying to consider.

I've had bad math experiences. I was advanced in math--bored by it, really, until I skipped sixth grade math. Which, as you can imagine, really shored up my weakening popularity in junior high, known, of course, for its leniency in the social structure. By eighth grade I was catching the high school bus in the morning for first-period geometry and catching a special bus--literally, the short bus--to go back to junior high in time for second period. Again, a sure-fire ticket to popularity.

By the time junior year started, I was accustomed to getting A's--near, if not at the top of my class. However, that year, my teacher (Mr. Harris, I hope you burn for this) started the year by saying, "I don't mean anything by this, but girls do worse in this class than guys do."

Sure enough, by semester's end I'd dropped out with a D-minus.

Even through all this I'd always insisted I didn't like math, that I wasn't good at it (what!?!?!) and that I'd never major in it; failing it (even when I went on to succeed with a 98% average grade the next year) only further entrenched my belief that I hated math. Even getting a 5 on the AP didn't convince me that I might have an aptitude for it.

Taking an AP exam, however, snares the test-taker into a pretty trap. At most colleges, the AP exam entitles the holder to one whole free course--as long as they pass the next one. I had to take another math course to get credit. And then to round out my math/science requirement, I took another one.

And then--I'm not quite sure what happened.

I had gone to college insisting that I might be a history major, psych, maybe, but definitely not math. At some point my sophomore year I looked around and realized I had to declare a major, and at that point, I could score a math major with far fewer classes than I could score any other major, which would allow me plenty of time to take linguistics, theater, photography, Russian and French. More to the point, though--I didn't mind. I didn't mind.

I realize that sounds lukewarm--I even felt like I had to apologize for it.

But somewhere between junior high school and graduating from college, I went from failing math to magna cum laude. And not minding that I was a math major.

The final nail in the coffin was returning to math after a five year absence. I got my MBA (punk-ass worthless piece of paper) and flittered from one job to another. And as I settled on returning to employment as a math teacher, I found out I'd have to take one more math class.

And I loved it. LOVED it.

And realized that I had actually really enjoyed my math classes all along. Unencumbered by years of accumulated bad faith, bad attitude and bad karma, math made perfect sense in more than just the I-can-do-my-homework way, and everything seemed to slide into place.

For years I'd been baffled by otherwise-smart friends of mine who insisted they were horrible at math. Especially language-whiz Sophie and my now-trilingual sister Lee, and quilting-queen Nicole and music-maven Emily. Not to say smart people can't be less-successful in other matters, but these women were all smart in areas extremely higly correlated with math skills. Language and grammar. Music. And if quilting isn't higher-level geometry in action, I really don't know what is.

I think they, much like myself junior year, were all taught that they were bad at math. I was just lucky enough--or had enough ego-pumping background--that it didn't stick.

In a very similar way, I think all these folks who cry "masochism!" and "You must hate yourself!" are taught that math is agony--it's a churn-and-burn waste of time and brain cells and rote learning and unfathomable mystery. And that makes me sad and angry.

Math, at its best, is like piecing together a quilt. You vaguely know what you want the outcome to look like, it's how you piece together the materials--what materials you use, and in what order--that make the difference. It's a puzzle, and the outcome may surprise you and shift and change several times from the planning to the execution stage, but when it's done, it's done. There's borders and nothing more to sew and you can show it to someone and say, "What do you think of that?" And that should always be satisfying and a source of pride--not of agony and self-hatred.

Our teachers--almost every single one of them--have done us a great disservice, to teach us that people who like math are somehow different than everyone else. Most of our math teachers have taught a great fear of math, even in people who are good at it. And I guess this great jumble of thinking and postulating is why I want to be a math teacher.

I enjoy math, and I don't think that's weird, and you shouldn't think so either. And that, more than any other subject, is what I want to teach.

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