I think that the world has made amazing strides since my fist college computer which was basically a large brick with a handle and screen. The typewriter probably has a museum someplace in it's honor. I think the computer was a good idea. And the laptop was better and the iPad is best. I'm not one of those people who is constantly on top of the best app or schmapp but I like making things simpler which seems to be the point of many of our innovations.
Of all of these inventions and gadgets my least favorite is the iPod and my most favorite is the calculator. Not the reverse notation one from business school, not the fancy graphing one that I could never figure out from trig, just the plain one with one button per number. I don't even need those "MC or MR" buttons because I don't know what they do. Just as longs as they will add, subtract, multiply and divide on my behalf, I'm pretty good with it.
As a point of clarification, I'm pretty fine at math. I did pass calculus and, while it wasn't with great style and flare, passed finance and accounting in business school as well. So I'm not bad at the concepts that math represents, I just have a bad memory for small factoids. In particular if those facts involve a 7 or a 9, sometimes even an 8. This extends to dates. I don't know when things happened. Like wars or foundings of things or rushes for gold. It has not impeded my progress as a human but wondering about why I'm so terrible where 7s are concerned has consumed a fair amount more time than perhaps it deserves.
I have mostly believed that I couldn't recall these small facts because I didn't care about them and they were not important to my life. However, as I have observed my daughter struggling with these same exact 7-9's, I think I was wrong there. It's clearly genetic. Yes, a genetic rejection of all things that include the numbers 7, 8 and 9. I'm a little uncomfortable even to write them here.
My daughter is a creative, free spirit. This girl can be found in the morning before school waiting ithe hallway singing songs at the top of her voice. I know because teachers have told me. She sings at recess if she has nothing in particular to do. I know because she has told me. Her friend told her she's a little weird sometimes. You think? But she's an independent woman with a funny, smart, great outlook on life. She reads and writes but just doesn't so much 'rithmatic.
Well, this lack of 'rithmatickin has caused a few educational issues in our time. That and a full revolt on holding her pencil properly have been the themes of every single conference from k-4th grade. By the way, you should see how I hold a pencil - nothing good there either. So it would seem that math facts such as 7+8 (one of my personal arch enemies) have not gone out of style like typewriters with the advent of the calculator. Those suckers still need to be memorized. And her brain won't memorize them.
So here I sit, typing on an iPad on the eve of her 4th grade conference wondering how I will, yet again, ask forgiveness for having passed along this genetic mental block. I wonder too how I can possibly encourage her teachers to stop making the speed of recalling basic math facts a competition - in her class, one that is rumored to be graphed on the wall for all to see her genetic impediment.
I suppose that I will just use the same argument as I have for now over 30 years of apologizing for this defect - an argument seldom met with acclaim by those in the field of math but one in which I find great solace in my times of low multiplicative self esteem:
" I find it simpler to use a calculator."
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