Pick on a Number

The thing is, I teach English. I actually teach people about English language and literature but we shorthand it as “teach English.” By law, therefore, I hate math. If you ever run into an English teacher (English not telling about ancestry but area of focus…focus on the language, not the ancestry) and he or she says that s/he likes math then run. The alien invasion has begun.

But WHY don’t I like math? Is it just because I never had a really good and empathetic math teacher who could help me understand WHY if Johnny had 5 apples anyone would feel the need to take 2 from him? Or why I should care how much fencing Mr. Smith has to buy when he increases the size of his pool by one half its current width. He has the money to expand his pool, let him hire a guy to do his fencing and just pay him. No – my distaste for math runs deeper. Math, itself, is the problem. I wonder why it has taken me so long to set these thoughts down, explaining why math is just plain bad but I shall stay silent no longer! Maybe things have finally come to a head. Maybe it is the vast amounts of sugar coursing through my system. I thank my sponsors – a large number of mega stuff Oreos and some Entenmann’s chocolate donuts for their faith in me and for the vast amounts of sugar coursing through my system.

This is a subject which sows discord. You say that it endorses clarity and unity by requiring a singular, particular and specific, objective answer? I say it requires us to study division! And not just local and short time division, but LONG division! Horrible. This is a discipline predicated on problems, trying to find exes instead of moving on in life. What does it value? Inequalities! Why all the focus on what is greater than or lesser than? Can’t we all just get adrink (or at least another donut)? Is it a study based in originality? No – derivatives everywhere. And all that talk about sets, sets, sets. How can we let our children be around this? Perverts. It is an area of study where it is still ok to discuss “slopes.” Totally inappropriate. I’m made uncomfortable by the idea of “cross multiplying” and I can’t even imagine what kind of travesty a rhombus is.

When we talk in English we say “all things being equal.” You see how beautiful that is? All things, equal. In math, if I could have said “all things being equal” then all the answers would have been the same and maybe I would have passed! Some people say “not for nothing, but…” and do you know what this means? It means I am not doing anything because of math. Even when we discuss numbers, we say “five will get you ten.” Do you see how egalitarian and socialist this is? You have five, it’s ok…take 10. When math wants to approach the sanity of personal understanding it allows in variables; and how does it signal them? LETTERS. That’s what I’m saying.

Do I need math to live my life? If I don’t tip, no. If I don’t expect change, no. Keep my page numbers in Roman numerals and let my tangents be in conversation. Math be darned.