Arch, I was exactly the same! I was so bad off that even though I was getting a Creative Writing major, I couldn't pass the most remedial math to get through. It just made no sense to me whatsoever. Do you find yourself calculating everything out the long way? That was one of my problems. I was too slow to score high on tests. Everything I did was correct, but I couldn't do it fast enough to pass.
Amazingly, two things happened that changed that for me. The first was working for a bank. I went in at the lowliest job (my husband told me I had a brain and I had to go use it) which was balancing transactions for big retail customers. So I might have a print out (this is in the 1980's) of thousands of transactions and I would have to identify aberrations and find the items (deposit slips, checks, etc.) to correct them. I was stellar at this because I pick up patterns so rapidly. Because I did so well, three months later, they promoted me to be a writer in conversions and mergers. There, I was forced to work for two weeks in every single department of the bank before I was allowed to do anything with conversions and mergers. One year of working on converting every software system in a bank and I suddenly understood math. I could caclulate interest in my head. I knew all the math rules in banking systems. Once I understood that, the bank actually paid for me to go back to school, I breezed through those math classes and got my degree on their dime. I went on to get my Master's.
Honestly, I don't know if anything else would have ever gotten through to me. The odd thing is that I'm extremely abstract in my thinking. I could understand theories in Physics without understanding the math. I will never understand how that worked. Math was the one subject where I had to have a concrete, real world experience to understand it.
04 Feb 2007, 8:27 pm
