how I came to hate the third "R"

My hate affair with mathematics began the first day I stepped into Miss Fowler's first grade classroom. She was short and shrivelled and had eyes that bored holes as she tried to write mathematical equations on my soul. She noticed pretty quickly that I didn't "get" arithmetic (like Einstein, right?) and wasn't content to just let it ride. I was her own personal math problem, and she was going to solve me.

One day, she kept me at my desk after school to try to "help" me get it. "Seven plus seven, Josh," she demanded, "do it again!"

"Twelve?" I offered, this time less confident.

"NO", she said, her fingers starting to worry the beehive of white hair on her head, frizzing it higher and higher as her eyes started to bulge.

"Okay, try this. I have seven apples. Then Jeremy comes over to me with seven more. How many do I have now?"

"None", I said, this time sure of myself.

"What?!?" she asked.

"We don't have apples in the jungle, Miss Fowler, and if we did I wouldn't have any because Jeremy would take them all. He's bigger than me and one time in preschool he pulled my pants down in line and everybody laughed."

She slapped a sheet of problems on my desk. "Add and subtract", she quavered, "Do it until you get them right."

So I did them, and did them again. I sniffled and did them until the sun was going down and my mom called looking for me. I pedalled my bike away from those problems and didn't looked back as Miss Fowler slumped at her desk, shoulder's shaking.

This, however, was only the beginning. In fifth grade it was discovered that I was still a numerical idiot. I was given a companion in torture, Matt Simmons, who came along for moral support as I was forced to trudge to the fourth grade teacher for water torture. While the fifth graders did fifth grade math stuff, Matt and I spent quality time with Miss Rose, who'd probably spent some time in the KGB's interrogation division.

Outside her classroom was a rusty old tap that spewed rusty old water. Every math day, Miss Rose would make us fill a HUGE cup with rusty water. Then one of us had to recite a multiplication table while the other drank the water. We did this over and over and over. The theory, I guess, was that fear of drowning is a primal human instinct, and therefore a marvelous teaching tool.

Moderate distaste had by then given way to seething hatred, so sixth grade was a relief. The first half of sixth grade I went to a Canadian public school where they taught first grade addition and subtraction, which by then I had mastered. The second half I was at an American private school where they taught pre-algebra, so the teacher told me to sit at the back and leaf through the textbook until I found something I didn't know, then do it. I got a lot of drawing done.

This all left me utterly hopeless for Mr. Barker back in Peru, who taught eighth grade algebra and hated every bit of it. As official algebraic class retard, I generally got the focal point of the lazer beam, except when I didn't.

Fortunately my dad was principal of the school. He pulled some levers and my own little hell was over. I haven't done a lick of formal math since. You say that's wrong and I should be ashamed of myself but you know what I think? I think you're jealous.

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Oh, by the way: starting on March Fifteenth at 7p.m. I'll have some paintings hanging at the "Bean Around the World" coffee shop on 19th and Main in Vancouver, BC. If you want to see them, there is where you should be, drinking caffeine.