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 BackThe Scarlet Letter I started supporting myself at the age of 19, married at 32. In those years, I kept a checkbook, as most responsible adults do. However, unlike most responsible adults, I never balanced that checkbook. I tossed bank statements out, unopened. I rounded all my checks up to the nearest dollar in my register, logged in deposits when I remembered, and somehow managed not to bounce any checks. As part of the merging of two hearts, one of the first things my husband did after we wed was sort out that ragtag checkbook. Not surprisingly, the account did not balance. Actually, I had $5,000 more than I knew. The point of this story is: I really suck at math. One of the compensations for being an adult is that you are rarely required to do things at which you suck. As an adult in normal circumstance, I often must do things I don't enjoy (clean the toilet, go to the supermarket, earn a living). But I am rarely, if ever, encouraged to do anything I'm bad at. If I can't do it and it needs to be done, I hire someone to do it for me. (Or I buy software. Quicken relieved my husband of checkbook management duty.) When planning my mid-life return to school, I anticipated my math requirement with dank dread. Before I could even enroll in college classes, I had to take "developmental" math ("remedial math," back in the day). My college career began with two summer semesters of algebra – two hours at 7:30 a.m. every weekday. I figured if I could survive that, I could survive anything else school threw at me. I worked hard in those classes, doing pages and pages of problems each night. Even my teacher scolded me for excess...When I admitted to spending an hour wrestling with one problem, he rolled his eyes. "Don't do that," he said. "If you can't get it, move on." But the work paid off and I did well. One of my tests is still posted on our refrigerator. "100," my teacher wrote in red magic marker."Excellent," he wrote."Good technique," he wrote, circling a spot where all my equals signs line up neatly, one beneath the other. I started to think math just might, be kind of fun. For a few hot minutes, I imagined having tapped into a hidden talent. And I got As in both semesters of developmental math. "Oh, that's not good," said my friend Christine. "Now you're going to want As all the time." She was right. Wanting to get the worst over first, I decided to stay the math course and get my requirement out of the way. I started college algebra in September. This class was harder. It moved faster. The teacher did not pamper us. Each class, formulas piled on techniques piled on concepts, one after another after another, until I gasped for air. By mid-semester, half my classmates had dropped. I barely hung on. On one homework assignment, I got a 25 out of 100. On the first test of the semester, I scored 68, my lowest grade ever. I was a good student in high school, but at the rate I was going, I would finish college algebra with a C. Of course, C is a passing grade, and I could have just accepted it and moved on. But, as Christine predicted, the specter of those As loomed. I am never content with being adequate and a C in my first full semester of college was deeply dismaying. I vowed to bring the grade up. I become algebra obsessed. I carried my textbook with me on a Las Vegas vacation and spent an afternoon in my room, working problem after problem after problem while my travel companions gambled, drank, caroused. Back home, I declined invitations and instead hunched over my notebook, clutching handfuls of my own hair, working problem after problem after problem. My husband and friends were equal parts amused, puzzled and exasperated. "Just pass," my husband said. "All you need to do is pass." "Nobody cares about your GPA once you graduate," a friend assured me. "Don't worry about it." "For god's sake," counseled another friend. "Take your gentleman's C and get on with your life." I pored over George W.'s college grades, published in the New Yorker magazine. Gentlemen's Cs throughout. For a moment, I was heartened, then depressed. Bush's grades were from Yale. A gentleman's C from the Ivy League is considerably different from one bestowed by community college. I was heartened by a quote, also in the New Yorker, from celebrity chef Ming Tsai. "As far as I was concerned, a D was for Diploma," he said. Then I was disheartened by my husband's philosophy: "B is for Bummer." And C? That's for careless, crappy, competent, but just barely. C is for "driving me crazy." How could I be a C student? I've lived in two cities. I'm on my second career. I've had articles published in national magazines. I've canoed the Amazon and seen Lenin in his tomb. I've interviewed Annie Leibovitz, Tammy Wynette, Carl Bernstein and Martha Stewart (twice – are we all impressed?). I read Henry James for pleasure. I saw Woody Allen on Broadway, Benny Goodman in Carnegie Hall. I've had a life. How could I get a C? We had the option of retaking tests to try to better our grades. I pinned my hopes on a retake of the first test and studied hard. My devil was in the details, as it always is. In fact, I turn work down if it is too detail-intensive. I tell potential clients, "I'm not good at details, thanks but no thanks." But that was not an option in the Testing Center, with pages of algebra in front of me. I understood how to do most of the problems, I was just bad at doing them. I'd get an entire procedure correct, but let an incorrect sign lead me down the path to the wrong answer. I subtracted when I should add and thrashed around with fractions. Calculators help, but you need an instinct for numbers to recognize when you have punched up an incorrect answer. I don't have that instinct. I scored a 69 on the retest – one lousy point better that my first attempt. At this point, exhausted and discouraged, I gave up. Clearly, I had reached my plateau. I was a C student in math. But I also started wondering why this troubled me so. I always knew I was bad at math. But of course, it's more than that. When you are self-educated, everything you know is a little miracle. People marvel at your accomplishments ... considering. When I encounter something I don't know or don't understand, I find consolation in telling myself, "I coulda learned that." If I'd gone to college. If I'd only tried. But maybe I couldn't. Maybe I was kidding myself. Until now, my knowledge stood on its own merits. But now, for the first time in my adult life, a tape measure is going to be held up to my intelligence. How long is it? How wide? How deep? I am afraid. Even more terrifying: how do I know what the marks on that tape measure are? By exactly what standards am I being measured? In math, I am measured by attention to detail. I suppose I will either learn better ways, or do poorly when this is the measure being taken. Then again, if I haven't mastered a skill at my age, is there hope that I can? Will my ability to memorize facts be measured? I'll fail miserably by that yardstick. Do the tick marks say, "Swallows ideas whole?" Also not my forte. Will my ability to submit to authority be measured? I'm in trouble. And how will the knowledge I have harvested myself measure up to the expectations of school? That sad algebra grade tapped into my deep fear: that I'm about to be stripped naked and under my clothes will be a large, scarlet C. I've been making my living as a writer for more than a decade. In deciding whether I should test out of basic English composition, I called the instructor of the class and explained my situation. "What sort of writing do you do?" he asked. For one thing, I was a staff writer for a large newspaper for years, I responded. "You should take the class," he said. "Newspaper writers don't know how to write paragraphs." What if college teaches me I'm stupid? Note: I got a low B in algebra, and found a teacher who allowed me to test out of basic composition – which I did easily. I transferred from community college to a university, where I maintained a 4.0 GPA until a statistics class dragged me down to 3.973. That darned math. My fears of a Scarlet C have abated. ©2003 Sophia Dembling. |
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Sophia Dembling See Sophie's book The Yankee Chick's Survival Guide to Texas |
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