Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater. - Albert Einstein

* * * * *

There are three kinds of people in this world: those who can do math and those who can’t.

Guess which group I belong to.

I’m pretty sure I hated mathematics from a very young age; I seem to remember hurriedly changing the channel as soon as I found out which letter had brought me the episode of Sesame Street I had been watching, not caring enough to learn the identity of the sponsoring number.

That’s a pretty clear sign, if you ask me.

Throughout school it always just seemed to me that we were learning things that we would never need to apply in daily life. I mean, why would I ever need to know anything about integers in my dream job as a lion tamer? It’s not like I was ever going to need to worry about having a negative number of lions to worry about. Now, a number of negative lions was a different matter entirely, but that hardly related to the math at hand.

Same thing with fractions, the only daily application of which I could possibly forsee was in the division and allocation of slices of pie. For this I had a simple rule: I always got the biggest piece. Thus, however you wanted to divide the rest of the pie, or fractionalate it, to use the mathematically correct term, was completely up to you.

Now of course, years later, these ideas became all too real. I simply had to add my monthly budget to my student loan payments and I’d get some interesting integers, resulting in me eating a fraction of the amount of food I might otherwise have enjoyed. Stupid math.

But still, many other mathematical concepts have remained a mystery to me to this very day. For example, I vaguely remember it being very important to do something called completing the square. I have no idea what this means now, and I have actually met very few squares in my time that needed completing in the first place. I suppose if I saw one drawn on a piece of paper, all open at the top or on one side, I could simply take my pencil and draw in the fourth side, but my memory is nagging at me and telling me that it was once much harder than that.

Geometry was also often confusing for me. Again, later in life, at University, I could see some practical use in having learned about triangles, squares and rectangles: how big is that couch sitting on the curb? will it fit through the door? what if we tilt it? and that sort of thinking, but I’m telling you now, most geometry is absolutely useless stuff.

What on this planet, in its natural or man-made form, is shaped like a rhombus?

Case closed.

* * * * *

I think what bothers me most about math is that two and two, no matter how hard you try to dress them up or disguise them, or tell them that, yes, they look like twos, but really they are sixes trapped in a two body, no matter how hard you try to convince them otherwise, two and two always make four.

There can only ever be one right answer.

And what bothers me about that is that I could get that answer wrong.

And I don’t like to be wrong.

* * * * *

In first year University my friends and I flooded a psychology study. They paid us $30 to write two, one hour multiple choice questionnaires a week apart. Yes, that’s right, $15 an hour to answer a bunch of serious questions meant to give them an idea of our general personality. These questions were intermingled with control questions to make sure we were actually paying attention to the content, so that right after a question about our leadership abilities we had questions like:

17. Sometimes I see snakes near where I live:

Strongly Disagree

Disagree

Neutral

Agree

Strongly Agree

The psychology students then took Polaroids of our faces and the main goal was for other psychology students to look at the pictures and try to discern whose picture went with which profile.

I have no idea how that was all supposed to work, exactly, but that is neither here nor there.

As we’re answering these questions it’s quite clear that we’re all checking them off at roughly the same pace, as every time we reached a snake-type question a suppressed giggle went through the whole room. I’m pretty sure we all found it impossible to read those questions and not hear Ralph Wiggum saying them aloud in our heads.

When they started to hand out the math section we were all a little hesitant. There we were, all English, History and Film students, and they wanted us to do math. I think a few of us were seriously doubting whether the $15 an hour, that’s 25 cents a minute by the way, was worth it.

We opened up the booklet and started laughing. I believe the first question actually was 2+2.

We flew in tandem through the next dozen or so questions and then, like the brick wall at the end of the crash test road, we hit question 14 all at the same time and the sound of pencils dropping on desk tops echoed throughout the classroom. I don’t remember exactly what the question was, but it may as well have been asking us to extrapolate the circumference of Mars, given that our pencils were twelve centimeters long.

While I had talked about it with friends before, and had heard others complain about their own lack of mathematical abilities, it is that moment more than any other that told me what I needed to hear.

I was not alone.

* * * * *

I think there are others out there like me who also share this problem: when it came to measurements, I was largely taught by a generation of Canadian teachers who had never fully embraced the metric system. Some of them knew it, some of them didn’t, and so I grew up knowing my distances in kilometers, my weight in pounds, my milk in litres and my height in feet and inches.

I’m not blaming the system entirely here, but it certainly didn’t help me foster an affinity for the subject.

* * * * *

Okay, fine. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Last story though, I promise.

There’s one math thing that I can do really well, it’s freaky really. Rainman freaky.

I’m really, really good at doing the whole time-distance thing. If we’re driving in a car and I know how far away our destination is and how fast we’re likely to be traveling, I can tell you in less than two seconds exactly what time we’ll arrive. I don’t even really do math in my head, I just know the answer.

It’s scary sometimes, isn’t it, to just know something?

The first few times I realized I had this ability I was all like, “Okay, who the hell put that there? Who’s in my brain? Jerry, is that you? Redrum… redrum…”

After a while it stopped freaking me out, especially after I discovered that I was almost always dead on.

Like I said, I don’t like to be wrong.

* * * * *

Linque Du Jour:

It’s Ask Dr. Math! Finally, after all these years, I can find out why six is afraid of seven! I just hope he knows the answer…

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Filed under: Life Happens

Happy New Year everyone from all of us here at The Next Chapter, and that includes our experts who, after their amazingly accurate predictions for last November, have been on vacation for the last little while.

But they are back, and as enthusiastic as ever about their predictions for the New Year.  These are some of the predictions they have shared so far.

- The Pittsburgh Steelers will win the Superbowl over the Atlanta Falcons, after crushing Miami and narrowly beating Tennessee in the post-season.  Our experts would like to add that, by September, because they had been so crushed and morally defeated by Pittsburgh, the Miami Dolphins will have given up their right to play in the NFL and will have sold the team to West Palm Beach where they will be renamed the Palm Beach Porpoises.  Team jerseys are not a popular sell with the kids.

- The Academy Award for Best Picture goes to… The Love Guru?  It is later reported that not a single member of the Academy had ever seen an Austin Powers movie and had lauded The Love Guru as “fresh” and “original”.

- Barack Obama 12-Month calendars will outsell Fireman calendars in December.

- People will buy eleven times the number of electric cars in 2009 than they did in 2008 for inner city use.  Many cities will add “rev lanes” to their roads so that drivers can push their car backwards several hundred metres before quickly jumping in as the car shoots forward.

- Green will continue to be the new black as everything from grocery bags to Tim Hortons cups to candy bar wrappers will be affected by the new national “landfill tax”, which will help support important green initiatives like the creation of government pamphlets discussing the need for green initiatives.

- A major disaster will occur somewhere in the world between June 3rd and November 17th and the news media will report on it.  There will be some survivors and some non-survivors.  A blog will link to a news story about it with a comment about how “tragic” this event was.

- Pictures of breastfeeding will be banned from all sites on the mainstream Internet due to “indecency”.  This includes sites that properly educate and instruct new mothers on how to breastfeed.  Those educational sites will now only be available on .xxx domains.

- Gay pet marriage will make the news in the U.S. this year, and it will be banned in all States except, for some reason, Missouri.  Canada will continue to allow gay pets to be married and those pets will continue to enjoy all the same benefits as heterosexual pet marriages.

- The biggest movie of the year will be Piranha 3-D, set for release on July 24th.  Our experts stand by this prediction more than any other.

- George W. Bush will be disappointed when no library or monument is named after him once his presidency is over.  He will get some small satisfaction, however, when all Burger King locations in Texas briefly feature the Bushburger with Fries Combo on their menu.  The combo features a small, regular Hamburger, with pickles, mayo and relish, but it’s really the side order of fries that is the main feature as they come in the largest size ever sold by the franchise and overshadow the burger completely on the tray.  The combo will later be renamed the “Fries Combo with Bushburger”, and that is how it will be remembered by future generations of Burger King patrons.

- For at least the month of January, and perhaps part of February, everyone will be feeling the effects of the leap second and will feel slightly out of synch with the world.  Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.

That’s it - we hope everyone had an excellent New Year’s Eve and that you’re as excited for 2009 as we are!

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Filed under: The Experts