9th February 2012 - Women just can't do math.

[Victoria Waterfield]

http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=02092012

The striptych grew a few extra tychs, he says.

Also, I'm not sure I understand what's going on.

[Jaded Tersk]

That's more maths than I can do.

[dejavroom]

So the nonsense about "count to twelve" is Ray's subconscious reference to 12 step programs?

[AugustWest]

My hovercraft is full of eels.

[side_show]

I remember when I realized I could do math.  It was surprisingly late in life.  I had been doing math my whole life, but from a mindset that I couldn't do math.  I had just finished clearly explaining compound interest to a guy who called the call centre for Mastercard that I worked at and I got off the phone and realized "hey wait, I understand math!" It was a pretty rad moment.  I wanted to call my grade ten math teacher Mr. Lindall and tell him to go fuck himself, and felt pretty triumphant about my new confidence the whole day. 

Also, we have a tool that looks similar to the thing about to grab Ray's eye ball.  It is meant for picking up bolts and such that have fallen into places hands can't reach.  Grandma also had a some what similar thing that was supposed to be a "pickle picker" the benefit I guess being that unlike a fork, you don't end up piercing the pickle.  I guess I'm not too caught up in food aesthetics because I don't give a flying fuck if my pickle has been pierced prior to eating it.  Both the bolt picker upper and the pickle picker seemed like silly uni-task tools to me, what with magnets and forks ready to do the job and many others...  It's mostly when I'm in the kitchen or at a kitchen-based store, but sometimes Alton Brown's voice chants "uni-tasker!  Uni-tasker!  Unitasker!" in my head.  It's a thing.

[littlefallsmets]

I sure as fuck can't do higher math.

I can do simple math in my head faster than most people, I think, but you get past... oh... intermediate algebra or something and I am fuckin' ignorant as hell.

Does this... make me a lady?

Have I been confused all these years?

[jay-ell]

I'm the opposite, LFM. I have problems with basic arithmetic. I can wrap my head around some level of more complex stuff, in theory, but not being strong in my basic math facts held me back, so I never got past what my college called "Functions and Graphs" (and I only got that far because I was forced to take a math credit). I am awesome at spatial relations and geometry, though -- as long as I can use a calculator and deal mainly with shapes and lines instead of numbers, I do fine. And I can still balance chemical equations, even though it's been (holy hell) almost twenty years since I've needed to, because I can visualize the molecules moving around. But calculus and physics are just...woof. Way beyond me.

I think I might actually have mild dyscalculia. I have trouble with certain numbers, mainly 7s and 9s but also occasionally 3s and 5s (insert Monty Python joke here). I just plain misread them. And I have never been able to remember strings of numbers -- even short, 4 - 6 digit strings, even for only a few seconds. If I have to look up a phone number, I can't remember it long enough to dial it -- I have to write it down or I will transpose numbers. I can only remember my PIN for my debit card by the pattern it makes on the number pad; if the configuration is different (i.e, a telephone-style layout) I am sunk. And I cannot add two double-digit numbers in my head, unless one of them is "10." Multiplication is right out.

My brother is a math teacher, he can multiply three-digit numbers in his head and figure odds and percentages on the fly in seconds. But he hates to read, he is a slow reader and he despises writing even more. The family joke was that he took all the math genes in the family and didn't leave any for me. It's odd how different our learning styles are. But the older I get the more I think that maybe my problems with math go beyond "I'm just not good at it" and are verging on "undiagnosed learning disability" territory.

It's something I've considered being tested for, actually, along with possibly having myself evaluated for adult Asperger's (or, I guess, as of the DSM-V, autism spectrum disorder). But I don't know if, at this point in my life, it would make any difference or do any good. (I welcome y'all's opinions on the topic, though).

[side_show]

One of my friends has a son with Aspergers and had herself and her hubby evaluated to normalize it for her son.  She found out she falls somewhere on the autism spectrum which her son often mentions.  It seems to empower him in some way.  She thinks everyone has autism though, which is a little annoying at times.

[littlefallsmets]

I chalk my difficulty with higher math up with my inability to learn a foreign language under the same blame as my mind being over committed to the English language, the fact that I was reading very early, that I can speed read and type around secretarial speed and so forth.

This might be bullshit but it was always my internal explanation.

[theinevitable]

I got really high scores on standardized tests of math, but can't actually do math to save my life. I never went beyond "pre-calculus." Lately I think I kind of miss math.

I was AWESOME at physics, though. My teacher wrote a note home complaining that I had a "zero" homework score, despite the fact that my average in the class was a 104 for the first 3 quarters. He had a weird system where homework was not mandatory, but if you did it you got bonus points on your tests. I didn't need the bonus points, so why do the dang homework?

...and then the last quarter I screwed up really badly on one test, and consequently got a B-. Since I didn't do any of the homework. WELL.

[Choop]

i took calculus and immediately forgot everything math-related that i already knew.

i've since forgotten what little of calculus i'd learned.

luckily, programming doesn't give a shit about math!

[oball]

If a number can't come real / Then I don't need that stumper
The concept of the variable / Can take it in the dumper

[greenkoolayd]

If a number can't come real / Then I don't need that stumper
The concept of the variable / Can take it in the dumper

amen, brah.

math is my academic weakness.  i didnt actually know my times tables until i was in 6th grade.

[wombat]

I am terrible at math, and it happened because I was too resourceful for my own good. They were thinking of skipping me over third grade, so they gave me extra work to do in math and I guess some other subjects and I did it well enough that they skipped me over the grade. Unfortunately what they didn't realize was that I was doing the multiplication problems by addition - like when asked what was three times six, I added up six three times. So I spent the rest of my school career lost in math classes, unable to keep up because I didn't have my multiplication tables memorized.

There is an important lesson here about how there are situations where it is NOT a good idea to apply creativity instead of memorization.

[jaydub]

I was good enough at math to pass tests without doing homework until pre-calculus when the layering of basic math skills slowed me to a crawl.  Then it was absolute torture, as I knew how to do the problem, but crawling step by step through the problem took forever and I hadn't developed the self-discipline to keep on task (my parents had to apply external motivation in the form of grounding, withdrawls of TV, telephone, computer, etc).  Then when it came time for college and I was determined to be a Scientist, I discovered that the pre-requsite for Biology was Chemistry, and the pre-requisite for Chemistry was high math proficiency.  I spent a summer teaching myself logarithms and retaking pre-calc in a Junior College, then banged through Calc I through III over the next year in a fit of "damn I can do this if I want to!"
Calculus, or at least the degree to which I pursued it, ended up being a waste of time.  I should have taken biostatistics like the rest of the biologists.  I had to teach myself statistics once I started working in the field.

Wombat's observation about the misapplication of creativity over memorization in some situations is right on.  One thing I learned over all this is that it isn't enough to know how to do a particular math process - you also have to drill it over, and over, and over to get the process to work efficiently so it can serve as a strong foundation for the next set of principles.