Dorrie’s Success Story

A bit of background is necessary in order to understand my "math story."  In my family, girls didn't need to know math.  Boys, however, had to learn math and go to college.  That's just the way it was.  There was no question that my brother would go to college.  I, on the other hand, was to "marry someone who would take care of me."  Math and college were not in the cards.  I also was never encouraged to do well in math. In fact what I heard at home and among my friends was that girls weren't "expected to be" good in math.   This negativity stayed with me throughout my entire adult life.   When I entered college as a returning adult student, I brought with me a very old deep rooted case of math fear.

In the 1970's I witnessed a phenomenon in my own family.  My husband was aware of my gender-based math fear and decided to try an experiment with our daughter.  When she was still very young, he began a type of benign brainwashing by playing math games with her, telling her how much fun math was and assuring her that girls were just as good in math as boys.  Apparently this worked; she not only did well in math through high school, but went on to study it in college, ending up with a Master's Degree in Math Education and teaching math in college.

At that time I, on the other hand, functioned conventionally at home as wife, mother and hostess.  When I finally decided to pursue my dream and go back to school, it was community college that I chose.  Since I had not been to college after high school, it was a big moment for me.  I also started at a time when older, non-traditional students were not as abundant as they are now.   I was eager to begin college, but quickly realized that in order to get a degree I would have to take math.  The dread set in immediately and my lack of confidence loomed as a major impediment to my objective of earning a degree.

As he always had been, my husband was there to encourage me and promised to tutor me, if necessary.  I had been out of high school so long that I felt it necessary to start with a couple of non-credit, lower level math courses to brush away the cobwebs.   Terror time!  The first course dealt with things like the order of operations.  I was sure I had never studied this in high school.  I didn't remember anything!  It took a lot of hard work and many nights being tutored in our kitchen.  There were many times that I wanted to quit.  My husband encouraged me, and I hung in there.  The end result was an "A" in this essentially “remedial' course and the development of some confidence.    The second course was Basic Algebra.  There was still plenty of fear there, especially since the word “algebra” was part of the course name. As my fear of math began to set in again, I guessed that I was probably about to meet my math wall.  Fortunately, for me and the others in my class, we had a wonderful instructor who took us step by step through the beginnings of algebra.  There were still many nights of sitting in the kitchen with open books and my husband by my side.  When I started Basic Algebra, I had managed to get "A's” in all my other courses.  This was encouraging and, in the back of my mind, I hoped to continue the straight "A" average for as long as humanly possible.

There stood Basic Algebra, the near certain killer of my "A" average. I read the book until I knew parts of it by heart, but my husband kept insisting that knowing the right answer to the book's problems was not enough.  I had to really understand the processes that led to the answers. My husband and I spent many, many more hours at the kitchen table, discussing the whys and hows.  I even was subjected to some of the same brainwashing that had been used on our daughter and some criticism of my parents ("they meant well, but they were wrong… you can do this!"). I had a lot of help from both my professor and my husband, but they did not help when I sat in the classroom and took the tests. One crutch that I remember and use to this day is that of using a piece of hard candy to calm one's nerves when taking a test.  Works every time!   Another "A" materialized, this time in an algebra class.  Neither my mother, nor my current friends nor - to some extent - I, could believe it. Again, I was encouraged and my confidence grew.  But the next math course that loomed was Intermediate Algebra… infamous among other students for being very difficult.

There were many hours in the kitchen with the books, more discussion of why and how, and leafing through the dog-eared pages of earlier texts to brush up on what I was supposed to already know. Yes, I also still had my personal, live-in tutor.  Half way through the class, it all began to make sense… the why and how. Suddenly when I looked at a problem, I "knew" what kind of problem it was and how to approach it. I now knew that I would not be satisfied with passing the course.  I wanted an "A", even in Intermediate Algebra, my next-to-final math class - and did get it.

My math requirements were almost finished.  I could take Finite Math which reputedly was not very difficult, or I could take College Algebra which was described as much more difficult, but a must if I wanted to go on after my Bachelor's degree and get a Master's.  Well, you guessed it.  While not wildly confident, my "fear" was gone and I chose the more difficult College Algebra.  This meant more time in the kitchen with open books.  For me, the hardest part was the dreaded word problems.  Even when he wasn't there I could hear my husband's mantra: "let x equal what you have to solve for… then find another statement that relates additional information about the unknown."  It was hard and I did think about dropping the course and switching to Finite to give me a chance at preserving my "A" average.  I was ashamed; my husband raised his eyebrow; I didn't drop it and somehow prevailed.  I graduated with a perfect 4.0 grade point average and was on top of the world at graduation.

Now that the heart palpitations have stopped and my degree hangs in my home office, I can look back calmly.    But to this day I feel satisfaction about the devils that have been banished.  The math saga was the highlight of my college career.  It gives me great satisfaction to have accomplished something that was difficult for me because of the childhood baggage I brought to the classroom with me. I am no mathematician, of course, but I have no math fear now… none.

By the way, for those of you skeptics who say "why do I have to learn math -- I'll never use it," here is a true story.  We were in a local restaurant where the tables were fairly close together.  I happened to overhear the man at the next table saying to his wife that he had to know how big a ladder he would need to get to a window 25 feet from the ground.  Seems the size of the ladder would determine how much the cost to rent it would be.  From the conversation, he had no idea how to solve this problem.   I said to my husband, "Should I show him the math he needs (Theorem of Pythagoras!) to solve his problem?"  He beamed and said of course I should.  I went to the table and quietly explained that I hadn't been eavesdropping but had indeed heard the problem.  I took the back of a napkin and showed him exactly how to figure out how big a ladder he needed.  He looked amazed, thanked me profusely, and I think I still have traces of a grin on my face!

If someone were to ask me to solve a system of linear equations in more than two variables, I couldn't do it at this moment.  But give me five minutes to review my old notes and my College Algebra book and I'll deliver the answer to you!  That, by golly, is progress.

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