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

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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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