Description

Are you frightened of mathematics? You’re not alone. By the time I was nine, I had developed

a full-blown phobia. In fact, my most horrible moments in grade school took place right

before an arithmetic test. My terror—and avoidance—lasted well into adulthood, until the

day I landed a job with a social service agency and was given the task of figuring budgets, which involved

knowing how to do percentages. I might just as well have been asked to decipher the strange squiggles incised

on the nose-cone of an alien spaceship. I decided I’d better do something quick, so I went to a friend of mine,

a fifth-grade teacher, and asked her to design a short course for me.

We met on Sundays for almost a year. She began each tutorial with a short lecture on the type of prob-

lem we would be working with, and then provided me with a yellow legal pad and a photocopied set of

problems—and sat doing crossword puzzles while I labored. We worked our way up to geometry that way,

and on into algebra.

“Mathematics works,” she told me early on. “Don’t ask why. Just do the problems. One day the light

will dawn.