Me And The Math Teacher: A Kid Story
I was always petrified of math. Not the real stuff, with dollars and cents and figuring out angles and such- but the abstract kind, you know, ALGEBRA. Those of you that read my story know that I never went to school until I was in my 40's. My Uncle Arthur tried to teach me math. Practical math I had no problem with, but when he tried to teach me algebra (which he didn't understand or remember that well himself) Wham! I hit a brick wall. So when I went to Adult Ed, they put me in the regular math class and I breezed so the guy that ran the show decided to put me in advanced. I was fucked and I knew it!
The teacher was some cheesedick from Central (where I wound up going to college) who thought he was King Shit of Turd Island because he was teaching math to a bunch of remedial idiots! I didn't like him from the get go. So he starts off with algebra and it went something like this:
"We have to solve the equation for X," he says.
"What is X?" I ask him.
"It's a variable," says he.
"A variable what," I ask. "What is it you're trying to find out... Is it apples, dollars, people, what?"
"It doesn't matter," he tells me.
"Then why do you need to know what it is, if it doesn't matter?" I ask.
"We have to find the value of it."
"If you don't know what it is, how can it have any value?" I got him!
"It can be anything," he says.
"Then let's call it 6 and be done with it. Six is a good number." I tell him. He's getting pissed.
"It doesn't work that way. You may need this later on."
"Look," I tell him, "I'm not trying to be difficult. I just don't understand why you're trying to find the value of something that you don't know what it is."
"Ok," he says, "We'll call it apples. If 4X (apples) = 3Y(apples) + 5 what is X?"
"How can X and Y both be apples?" I ask him. "I'm just trying to conceptualize what we're doing here."
"Because they're variables." We're back to square one!
Mercifully, the GED test came before the end of the class and it was mostly practical math. I scored in the 80th percentile. To show how bad at math I am, here's something I don't understand. On the history/social studies part of the test, I got all the questions right and scored in the 98th percentile. How can 2% score better than 100% on the test?
When I got to college, I had to take a remedial math class for my proficiency. It was called Math 055 (it wasn't even a 100 level class). The girl that taught it was working on her PhD and for some reason when she started explaining algebra, a light went off and it all became clear. I found out I'm pretty good at math. I even took a couple higher level classes.
THAT was such a good read! I love that you questioned what and why they were trying to teach you! I admire that. Great story with a great ending!
Thank you!
Nice story ! Enjoyed it !! Thank you @richq11 .
Thank you!
welcome !
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cool story
Thanks... I always hate writing dialogues.
To anyone who understands math, it should be immediately obvious that a kid asking questions like that is going to be good at math. Most math teachers, I think, suck at teaching and/or math, so they can't teach it effectively.
Algebra is directly useful to life, but teacher needs to be able to explain that algebra is for understanding abstract patterns so that when you recognize a concrete situation that fits the pattern, you don't even have to pause to think; you've already done this before, so it's easy. Algebra is the blue print phase, arithmetic is the cutting wood and building phase.
Hey, it's my old buddy! I wasn't a kid, I was in my 40's. But you're right! He had this air of superiority and it was his inability to explain it. Algebra is actually not that complex if you understand the fundamentals and that's where he failed. The girl that taught it in college took a very fundamental approach and it all made perfect sense!