Automathography

I ran into this organizing some files on my computer. I wrote it for a math class that asked me to write a few pages about my personal history with math (This was not your typical math class, I believe the title of it was something like "Math for Liberal Arts Majors" or "Math for people that don't do math but need it to graduate") This is what I came up with.


Peter Frick-Wright
Freshman
Undeclared, no majors under consideration
Phone #: ext 4060
Residence: Newcomb 358

Math Experience: None

I want to take this class because it fulfills a math requirement and I’ve found that non-traditional math classes are easiest for me to learn in. I’m running low on classes that I need to take for general education before I choose and work on a major, so I slotted this one in.

Automathography: My math education started long before my first day of school. Born into a family of teachers, one of which taught at the elementary school I would be attending, I was plopped down to drool on myself at a weekly school event called “Family Math Night” before I was old enough to count. These nights featured math games much like Poison (a game we learned early that day) for kids to play with their parents and there was always a particularly difficult problem or logic puzzle at the front and a prize to be had for the solver of the riddle. Due to my competitive nature and perhaps because the nature of the prize was often candy, it became my goal each week to solve that puzzle before anyone else and flaunt that prize in the faces of the minds I had just defeated. I was six years old.
Despite my best work, and efforts that sometimes crossed the line of cheating, I never did get that prize. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that I could have failed so miserably once a week for so long and not grown bitter at Mathematics, but bitterness did not occur until seventh grade pre-algebra. Based on my sixth grade math grades, I was placed into the more advanced pre-algebra class where we were asked to solve problems like 3 X a =12 a=? For the life of me I could not figure out how the letter a had gotten so lost as to end up in a math class, and after a long and embarrassing exchange between me and the teacher in front of the whole class which ended in my yelling “But why are there LETTERS in MATH problems!?!?” I transferred out of the class because it turned out I had missed some important math concepts somewhere along the line.
The rest of my math experiences are a scattered re-living of seventh grade. The distributive property puzzled me for months in the class that I transferred into, but there were no lower levels of math to run to. Tangent, Sine and Cosine were completely foreign concepts to me and too similar to remember even today, much less in junior high. In high school I found my math niche in a class called Integrated Math, where every problem was supposed to be based on a “real life event.” My favorite “real life event” was when we were learning about exponents and the Skittles the teacher provided for a hands on approach were not too old to eat. For some reason, the hyperactivity of the class was the only thing that grew exponentially.
Honors chemistry two years later was a week-long realization that I again lacked some basic skills in math. Luckily this time there was more tact during the teacher-student exchange.
Teacher: “Peter, I don’t think that you have the Math skills to be in an honors level Chemistry class.”
Me: “What makes you say that?”
Teacher: “Well, in the calculations section of your last lab report, all you wrote was ‘Taste the Rainbow.’”
Me: “But all my friends are in this class.”
Teacher: “You should transfer.”
So I dropped the class, got an excused hour, and spent that time volunteering at the same elementary school where I cheated my way to the bottom all those years ago. I started as an all-purpose tutor, helping kids with everything from tying their shoes to writing about Lewis and Clark, but after an episode in which I was forced to distract my student with candy so that they would not find out that I could not help them with their long-division, I became a reading specialist.
This trend of running from Math has followed me to college. I changed my intended major two days after arriving on campus and seeing the math requirements of a degree in Kinesiology. I am now undeclared and searching for a major that incorporates things I’m good at (See: Not Math) and things I enjoy (See: Skittles).