A while ago when my friend Tom and I were looking through our old yearbooks, I was surprised by the caption under my picture in our 9th grade book. The second phrase says "math brain!!"--yes, with two exclamation points. Math brain? I remember math as being extremely difficult. I spent hours at the kitchen table with Mom struggling through my math homework. When I was in 6th grade she had to re-teach me how to do long division, because the way they taught it to us in 4th grade made no sense to me (it was the era of the New Math).
Yet at the beginning of 8th grade the school placed me in Algebra 1, and advanced math class in Junior High School. That meant Geometry in 9th grade and Algebra 2 when I was a sophomore (the first year of high school in Darien in those days). Lots of long evenings at the kitchen table with Mom. I was relieved to finally be able to stop taking math classes after a semester of Trigonometry my junior year.
That began a two and a half year break from math. When I arrived at Rockford College at the beginning of my sophomore year, I had to choose between math and science. I chose math as the lesser of two evils, having suffered through three years of lab sciences beginning in 9th grade (Earth Science, Biology, and Chemistry). Imagine my surprise when I tested into Calculus. Imagine my further surprise to find that I actually understood Calculus. I just couldn't do the proofs correctly because of the Algebra involved. I did extra credit problems and always took advantage of my professor's office hours. So when the same professor offered Intro to Statistics second semester, I thought why not. My mother thought I was crazy. Yet I aced the class, and the skills I learned that semester were ones I used frequently in my various jobs over the years.
Which brings us to Sudoku, those grids of nine boxes of nine squares with some of the numbers filled in. I've avoided it like the plague, after all it involves numbers. Math. Yick. Many people say they're simply logic puzzles. Well, that was another reason to avoid them. I spent years telling myself logic puzzles were fun. You know, the ones that give you clues like "Mary lives next door to John, whose surname is not Smith. Neither of them lives in the house with the blue shutters where the Dalmation lives." Then you are supposed to figure out each person's given name, surname, the house they live in, and their pet. These puzzles even came with a handy dandy grid to help you solve them. I finally realized I didn't enjoy doing them and never picked one up again. Give me a crossword puzzle any day.
Yet every day on the train I'd see people working the numbers. My boss got hooked on them one afternoon last Spring while we were waiting for a delayed flight home. Finally, during a flight to California for a meeting, I decided to try one of the ones in the in-flight magazine. I'd finished the crossword puzzle, the movie was over, and I'd finished my book. It was an unmitigated disaster. How on earth can anyone do these, I thought. So don't ask me why I picked up a booklet of them in Grand Central Terminal on the way home one evening last month. Realizing that the system of dots and x's that I'd used on the airplane wasn't going to work, I studied the first one for a while. Over the following week I had a couple of "duh" moments--things I'd read in the directions but hadn't really understood until I started playing with the grids. Suddenly, these number puzzles started to make sense to me. It wasn't math, it was patterns. These were like jigsaws with numbers, not those wretched logic puzzles. I actually enjoy doing them. Amazing.
I haven't been doing as much reading during my commute time these days.
Peace,
Jeffri
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