I loved math as a kid.
In grade school, I got awards. I learned natural numbers, ordinals, the reals with both rational and irrational, decimals and fractions, long division and basic Algebra. I also learned most kids are assholes and most classes with even great, caring teachers are boooring; I learned slumping comfortably toward 'F'ailure caused massive trauma in a host of attendant adults that could be easily patched with some quick triage and a few weeks of selective personal sacrifice; I learned to hate school. I understood it intended to help me and recognized it wasn't trying very hard. Regular classes with strict curriculums and standardized testing with time limits and tiny pencils and bubble-filled pages threatening PASS OR FAIL were not, how you say… encouraging? (There was one year of Montessori around the age of eight in Colorado Springs I remember fondly to this day — I got myself out of bed, dressed and remained noncombative during the drive to class.)
Knowing no better, I soldiered on. I took Geometry and Algebra in junior high. I got chickenpox and silver dollar-size blood-filled blisters all over my pubescent 9th-grade body at one point and missed three weeks of study. Upon returning, I found myself to be several theorems behind and unable to catch up; once challenging material became more unmanageable noise in the titanic maelstrom [1 point for using 'maelstrom' in a sentence] of teenhood. But for the grace of a kind teacher, advance I would not.
High school Honors English, Chemistry and Algebra II marked my final attempts at willful compliance. On the up side, apart from a vaguely positive impression of 3rd grade with the glowing Mrs. Schoenberger — my very first gender-specific infatuation — only sophomore Chemistry and Algebra II stand out as interesting subjects presented by desirable teachers… Still, I barely skated through. I was never the best student.
I completed high school by padding my workload, where possible, with anti-academic choices like more art classes, Typing for a second time, Wood Shop, Guitar and Weight Training. (Don't get me started on the horrors of a high school locker room with exposed rows of side-by-side low-boy toilets along one wall, shower heads along another and Coach Ballsqueezer pacing the middle. Disappointed by our particularly weak performance while running laps, he'd lock the entire class inside and scream at us for being soft and likely unable to survive as he did in Vietnam, walking for days and eating rice from his hat).
Free of such institutional dysfunction, I worked for a few years after graduation with zero thought to further schooling. A firm conviction to never again sit my days away, motionless and silent in a fluorescent-lit room, gave me comfort. But, eventually, interpersonal family pressure and my first romantic fiasco made life in a town I really didn't like much anyway increasingly uncomfortable. So, the time came to leave home — one part expulsion, two parts escape.
Averse to school, acceptable routes were few. The specter of countless additional years in class with teachers and students and [aaack] homework made pursuit of my science interests unthinkable. My father, a two-time Army enlistee, convinced me with his oft-repeated phrase "never join the military" that joining the military was a bad idea. Finally, the only option that made any sense also happened to look like the easy way out. Perfect! I pursued the one path that felt comfortable by entering an art program at a two-year trade school several hundred miles away: education à la carte with credentials over easy and some healthy distance on the side. Hold the academics, please.
Imagine my dismay at discovering a portion of tuition and a chunk of my day would be dedicated to basic math in order to satisfy state requirements. Between Typography and Airbrushing, for several hours every week, I sat in a little room at a tiny desk surrounded by other twenty-something professional artist hopefuls studying addition and subtraction, decimals and fractions. Goddamn what a bummer.
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This little yarn was inspired by Andrew Hacker's recent opinion piece in The New York Times Sunday Review, Is Algebra Necessary?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-necessary.html
