On Algebra

November 4, 2024 

I can still remember the first time I walked into the classroom of a public school. I had learned punctuation in charter school portables, memorized scripture verses in Sunday school classrooms, and sheltered from a tornado in a church bathroom (more times than I could count on one hand). I studied the seating chart, projected on the board at the front of the classroom, before finding my seat at one of the desks. My teacher, Mr. Fink, was a man: loud, always joking, and sometimes even climbing on top of desks and cabinets. I loved school. 

“Has anyone ever done ‘Everyday Math’?” he asked us on the first day. My hand shot up,  

“At my old school, we did math every day,” I said, smiling. The classroom erupted into laughter. As it turned out, Everyday Math was a curriculum, Common Core. That day, I began to realize how much I did not know. While my classmates debated whether new school division or old school was faster, I was learning long division for the first time. During multiplication drills, I would fill out the 0s, 1s, 2s, 5s, and 10s and then stare blankly at the paper in front of me. I could count by 3s and 4s in my head, but by the time I got there the stupid timer would go off, as I looked around and saw the mostly full papers of the students around me. I would flip my paperback over as quickly as I could, hoping that the wandering eyes of my classmates would overlook the glaringly white sheet, suspiciously free of pencil marks. It wasn’t long before my teacher noticed.  

“Would you mind coming in early to school tomorrow, so we can go over this again” he asked me, after returning a math test that was full of red “X” s. He explained that I needed time to catch up, I was far behind the other students, but I had just moved so I could catch on with a little review.  

The next morning, I walked through the empty elementary school hallways with my little sister. She was in 1st grade and was amazed at being upstairs, where the older grades were taught. For 30 minutes, several times a week, Mr. Fink taught me the basics of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade math. I would stare at word problems until my brain ached, while my sister, who had recently tested into the gifted program, sat patiently and read The Mysterious Benedict Society.  

It wasn’t that I was stupid. I'd had a series of unfortunate educational events, in which a beloved 3rd grade teacher was fired without us students being notified. I cried all the way home from school after she told a few of us that she would not be coming back to school. Her replacement, a tyrant from New York, my first male teacher, who would frequently call us dumb, lose his temper, and scream at us. He was also fired, after one incident where he lost his temper and swore at us. By the time the third 3rd grade teacher had arrived, math was pretty much a lost cause as we scrambled to learn enough to pass the STARR test. Despite this precarious past with math class, I was determined to catch up.  

By the time I made it to middle school, my grades had gradually improved enough to dull the sting of embarrassment of being in 5th grade and not knowing multiplication tables. I didn’t just do my assignments; I was good at school. At one point, my English teacher recommended to my parents that I take a special test. I answered questions with logic problems, shapes, things that were not what we studied in class, though I answered them to the best of my ability as I was carefully timed.  

She is brilliant in English class. She is engaged in history class. She gets almost perfect grades and reads at a college level. But her math score was concerningly low. Fails to grasp basic arithmetic.  Things I overheard, though I never received the results of that test. It wasn’t a game of catch-up. I began to believe, as my middle school math teacher told me, that some people never really “got” math after elementary school.  

In 9th grade, I hid failed math tests in my locker, telling my parents that I was staying after school for “extra help” instead of making up failed assignments.  

Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. The zeros piled up until they covered my mind in a dense fog, in which I could not hear my teacher. I sat in class as words like “variable”, “coefficient”, and “integer” rolled off the conveyor belt of clouds coming from my teacher’s mouth. Eyes staring blankly at the whiteboard, my mind traveled hundreds of years away.  

When the end of that year came, I realized that there was nothing I could do to make myself smarter. I redid tests 4 and 5 times, scribbling away at take home packets for hours in my room. The algebra final, a thick block of paper, sat like a death sentence on my desk. Page after page, I drew a squiggly question mark next to equations. I read the numbers on the page, but nothing churned in my brain. The gear that was meant to kickstart the whole process failed to switch.  

The shame that filled my stomach was like nothing I had ever felt as I showed my parents my grades for the year. My algebra grade sat at a 60%; One degree lower and I would have had to repeat the class. Those practice packets and make-up tests were the only thing carrying me, since I had absolutely bombed the final.  

I wish I could tell you that I had a “click” moment, when those gears that everyone else seemed to have finally clicked. I sat through three more math classes of high school, never not needing to stay after school to make up for failed tests. But at a certain age, people stop asking you whether you know how to multiply by 9s (with or without the trick?). When you are an adult, it becomes almost irrelevant whether you can find the coefficient. At some point, I learned Saussure’s semiotics: sign, signified, signifier. And I have made peace with the idea that some of these terms will forever be signs to me, untethered from any working in my brain. As I sit here, a college graduate in one month, I still can’t tell you what 6 * 7 is, nope, not even by counting on my fingers.