Steven Hughes/The Globe and Mail
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I was never ashamed to admit I was bad at math. As a teenaged waitress, I would quite openly make little dots all over each bill and count them up to get the total. I made it all the way through a BA without learning how to solve for x.
Through some oddity of genetics or amazing parenting, though, all four of my sons are math whizzes – even the one who is a writer. My kitchen has more square footage devoted to whiteboards than it has to counter space.
For years I have hovered at the fringes of their conversations about transcendental math and imaginary numbers. But when my youngest taught himself calculus in Grade 9 using just a book and a bit of effort, being math obtuse stopped feeling like something written into my genes and started to feel like just plain laziness.
I began to wonder what it would take for me, a fiftysomething mathphobe, to learn math?
Two months ago, with some trepidation, I enrolled in Math 10 at an online public school. As I feared, the activation assignment revealed I was missing basic skills: Before starting the course, I spent more than 50 hours relearning everything above Grade 3 arithmetic.
My friends, for the most part, have called me nuts. Many of them are writers and made the point more eloquently: "Are you nuts?" and "You're really nuts!" They've humoured me, but none has brought chocolate or a casserole.
"What do math-y people think about people like me, who are quite proud of not knowing any math?" I asked a Google Site Reliability Engineer with a degree in mathematics and computer science who just happened to be standing barefoot in my kitchen.
"Oh, we think of you as 'I don't like math, I love fuzzy kittens' people," Stephanie said, kindly. (The kindness may have been because she's my daughter-in-law.) She added she's always found it strange that we are so willing to let our math skills evaporate, since everyone learns math in school. "People bond over not knowing math," she pointed out.
Chad Orzel, the author of How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, complained about innumeracy in a 2008 blog post. "I have seen tenured professors of the humanities say – in public faculty discussions, no less – 'I'm just no good at math' without a trace of shame," he wrote, noting that the same people look aghast if he says he doesn't know much about art or music.
For fun, I gave a survey to more than 30 of my classmates in the graduate fine-arts program at the University of British Columbia. All but one agreed they love fuzzy kittens. Several professed terror at just the sight of the six Grade 10 math problems I included. "Oh God, no! This is a nightmare!" was scrawled across one survey.
What has it been like, learning math? Hard work, certainly. Many days I've spent six hours or more figuring out solutions to questions that until recently I didn't know (or remember) existed. Each time I start a unit I'm sure this is where my mathless DNA will falter. I've failed some practice quizzes and have cried in frustration. But more than halfway through the course, I have a solid 93.7 per cent.
The thing I didn't expect was that just thinking about numbers would lead me far beyond what's covered in the curriculum. There are mysteries to beguile even a beginner. Almost immediately, for example, I found that when I divided 1 by 3, my calculator gave me an answer of .33333333. I understood that the .3 was infinitely repeating. But it was also clear to me that if I did the calculations myself, three rows of .333 (repeating) added together would never add up to 1. They would always total .999 (repeating). My calculator was fudging the answer.
"Please don't blog about that!" one of my sons begged me. "That topic is banned on math forums around the world because it draws crazies. Just accept that .999 (repeating) equals 1, and move on."
Considering that only last summer I couldn't calculate the area of a triangle, I've come a long way. One morning, my youngest looked over my work and asked me, "Mom! What is 64 to the negative two-thirds?"
"One over 16," I answered immediately. We both cheered.
I asked George Bluman, UBC professor emeritus of mathematics, whether there's any point to a middle-aged person learning math. He said one of the purposes of math is to achieve an informed public. "Journalists are woefully weak at math and so take press releases at face value even though there are often math errors or mispresentation of data."
I'd already noticed I am better able to handle statistics, but I wondered whether he could think of anything more inspirational. Then he told me about a woman over 40 who approached him for help with math, starting at the Grade 10 level. Several years later, he interviewed her for medical school. "She ended up being the oldest ever admitted to that date," he said.
So, today I am factoring trinomials. Until last week I didn't even know the word. I have great hope for my math skills. Who knows? Maybe one day I'll write a book, How to Teach Trigonometry to Yourself. Until then, at least I can talk math with my kids.
Maureen Bayless lives in Vancouver.