Colonel Lady Une
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- Posted: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 06:41:18 +0000
What It’s Like To Be Mathematically Disabled
Math is the enemy and I have utterly been crushed on the battlefield. As I write this, I’ve already failed an Algebra long test. I surrendered! I just couldn’t slay that mathematical beast with my lacking abilities. Even with technology on my side in the form of Good Old Blue, my calculator and dear friend for the past four years, I was still slaughtered. My test paper is soaked in the blue blood of my pen and scarred with horrid numerical shapes. I’ve been killed! Shot through the heart by several wicked arrows called equations...
Having a mathematical disability means that I regularly get butchered during tests. Do you recall those scenes from zombie movies where a crowd of the undead is gobbling up someone they’ve got pinned up against the wall? I’m the one pinned up against the wall being gobbled up by confusion! I’m guessing my paper will come back to me with a huge red egg on it. Oh well, I’m to blame. My brain goes haywire whenever it’s faced with numbers.
I’d like to recount a specific instance wherein that occurred. In class, we’re regularly divided into groups. I belong to a class of thirty-six and one time, a teacher wanted to divide us into three groups. She randomly asked what thirty-six divided by three was and thinking I could do simple division mentally, I called out my answer, “Nine! No! Uh, eighteen! Wait! It’s nine! Thirty-six divided by three is nine, right?” As it turns out thirty-six divided by three is twelve. Twelve! Twelve now holds a special place in my heart as one of the many memorable answers that eluded me. I’ll place it right next to “SPOONABLE” which my English teacher insists isn’t a real word but that’s another story.
Math is the reason I went to summer school in my sophomore year. It’s nothing to be proud of. I like to think of summer school as jail. You do the crime, you pay the time. My only crime was being mathematically disabled. I swear it! In court, I’d plead insanity. INSANITY! I didn’t mean to fail all those tests! My pen just wrote random numbers then the paper came back to me bloodied with red ink! I didn’t mean to kill those equations! It was self-defense! I heard voices in my head! They confused me and so I plunged my pen onto the paper and watched those numerical wounds appear! I didn’t mean to do it! Don’t put me away!
But I was put away and I was never the same after that summer. During the time I spent in custody, I felt the heat of summer taunting me. My face burned from the sun but it also burned from embarrassment and shame. Oh the shame! I came out of that classroom with knowledge but not the ability to love math. Math which put me in that summer prison...
To me, math is like that mildly electrical numbness you feel in your feet after you’ve sat cross-legged for too long. That feeling makes one uneasy on their feet and each step is a mixture of pain and electric sensation as one tries to keep balance. Now, when faced with this feeling, a regular person would have difficulty walking but being disabled, undoubtedly, I’d trip, fall down a flight of stairs and break my neck. This is how math affects me. It befuddles me to the point of near-death.
I envy my classmates who have “The Gift.” You know the type, those geniuses who can sleep through a class, wake up to a quiz and still get a perfect score. Sometimes I wish I could borrow talent like that. I’d just walk up to a mathematically-gifted person and ask, “Hey friend! Can I borrow your math talent? I’ll lend you one of my abilities. Do you want my ability to sleep through anything or the ability to eat a dozen doughnuts in under an hour or the one that allows me to drink ten glasses of iced tea in rapid succession without being sick?” Then again, unless you live in a noisy neighborhood and/or are joining a doughnut eating contest and/or are competing in an iced tea drinking battle, I doubt you’d want my talents.
Still, a girl can dream, can’t she? I guess that’s why I’m mathematically disabled, I’d rather dream than look at the logarithms on the blackboard. Call me lazy. Call me frustrating. Call me the worst math student ever. For me, hell looks nothing like a lake of fire. My hell is sitting in math class looking at a blackboard full of numbers and symbols and comprehending nothing while everyone else nods in understanding. It’s discouraging, you know, to try to listen again and again only to be thwarted. That’s why my idiot brain has decided to perform a pre-emptive strike and shut-off my ears when math enters the picture. It’s trying to protect me from a headache but, undoubtedly, I’ve set-off a self-destruct system in my head the moment my ears have a meltdown.
You see, I like to think its subconscious. Maybe in a past life, I was a doughnut eating princess who wandered the forest picking peanut butter doughnuts from doughnut trees. Then, all of a sudden, an evil, um, moose! Yeah, a moose, tells me, you cannot eat doughnuts unless you tell me what thirty-six divided by three is. So I answer, “Nine! No! Uh, eighteen! Wait! It’s nine! Thirty-six divided by three is nine, right?” Of course my answer’s wrong and that is why I suck at math. Ok, I’m making stuff up but it was a funny theory, wasn’t it?
My mathematical mentors must be stung by this. Dear math teachers, it isn’t your fault. My skull is impenetrable when it comes to your subject. When I am irritable, it’s because I’m disabled. Do forgive and understand. It’s not you, it’s me. I do realize that math’s necessary. I need math to count money to buy doughnuts. I need math to tell time and see when class is dismissed. Math is unavoidable and I will continue to clash with it until the end of time. Of course, I’ll keep losing but, hey, at least I fought the battle instead of letting it trample me without a fight. Of course, if it beats me up enough, I’ll surrender. Just don’t take away my doughnuts, ok? As long as math provides me with the ability to buy doughnuts, there will be some semblance of peace.
