November 26, 2007: Egad. Someone took my math.

When I was a little kid, I was terrible at math. Or, more accurately, uninterested in math: my family had said we're not good in math, and I shrugged and let it go at that.

Suddenly, though, I took three classes in high school from Shirley Losey and everything came together for me. I'm not sure what she did, but suddenly everything clicked and I was getting As. I'd do my homework during her lecture that day, listening to the concepts and practicing it right then.

(She was, incidentally, the most interesting classroom manager I've ever seen. When the kids got rowdy, she'd just take on this sad, disappointed expression and wait for them to feel guilty, which they always did. Maybe the small voice and stature helped.)

Anyway, she was a great teacher, probably one of the top three in my sadly mediocre pre-college education.

And now, I have betrayed her.

I've forgotten all my math.

For a variety of reasons I'll reveal in another entry soon, I'm studying math again. Sadly, I had to start over again with fractions and exponents and factoring and geometry.

Seriously. I had to practice converting mixed numbers into fractions.

Now, I am getting better but nowhere near the awesome zen-like trance I used to enter while taking math tests back in high school, when the front of my brain would buzz and time would stop and I'd do the stuff largely in my head.

Charles Beaumont, one of my favorite writers of the weird, died in his thirties from an early-onset form of Alzheimer's. I worry sometimes about my tricky memory, and times like this--when entire subjects I used to know disappear altogether--make me all the more nervous.

Yes, you need to practice your math. And no, I haven't had to calculate the volume of a cylinder in about fifteen years. But for it to be completely gone like that is still terrifying.

Sigh. At least I still know how to blog about it.

For now.

(And stop crossing your fingers.)

Posted by Will Ludwigsen on November 26, 2007 9:42 PM | Permalink