What Happened to the Math Genes?
"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you."
(from the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling )
http://www.swarthmore.edu/~apreset1/docs/if.html
In order to fulfill my graduation requirements, I have to take another semester of math 0_ cringe!_o
Math and I do not see eye to eye because we tend to fight for utilisation of the same side of the brain. Math wants to use the left hemisphere, when most of the data the LH has absorbed is mainly music-related. Ironically, studies have shown (and these studies must have been done by folks who have not an inkling of musical knowledge)
that people who show a proclivity for musical theory and performance tend to be excellent math scholars. I am living, breathing proof that for me, these are the polar opposites. HA!
My mother tends to brand me as a 'prodigy.' Now, prodigy to me means that cute little car made by Mazda driven mainly by college students and starving writers. I am/was no musical prodigy. I simply had the inherent ability to play any song I've ever heard. I'd learn to play the song *first, then I would learn the sheet music, altering here and there what I thought should have been changed. That doesn't mean i'm a genius. I do have perfect pitch (something I lost after giving birth but regained.) I do have the knack for memorizing pages and pages of music, mentally photocopying each page so I can 'flip through' the score and reference any given bar. I didn't know that how most musicians *don't* retain memory; most do it by touch. I do both, and my tendency to do the mental page-flip is stronger than the compulsion to feel my way across a keyboard if I miss a note. Who knew?
Well....back to the math thing. Today in class we were given a test to show more or less what we know. Basic stuff--the addition and multiplication--was small potatoes for me. Throw in the counterparts subtraction and division required a little more effort. Mix in letters and integers and parentheses, brackets, little pointy thingys that look like single quotations and I'm in fucking Siberia, man.
With God's grace and hopefully divine interference, I will get through this class with AT LEAST a C, which would shame me 8^(
Someone told me that I have such trouble with math because I have such a hatred for it that I've blacked any possible route to learn it. Bull puckey. I hate math because it hated me first, in the form of a sadistic dried-up bag of a teacher named Mrs. Wells who used to shame me in front of the entire third-grade class. Called me lazy while I stared at the math book in tears and confusion. Everyone thought that because I was a super reader taht I should have been adept in math too. It took many years for me to convince my teachers and my mother that I was not lazy, that I didn't understand what I was supposed to do with these problems. So much for pathos *shrug*
(from the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling )
http://www.swarthmore.edu/~apreset1/docs/if.html
In order to fulfill my graduation requirements, I have to take another semester of math 0_ cringe!_o
Math and I do not see eye to eye because we tend to fight for utilisation of the same side of the brain. Math wants to use the left hemisphere, when most of the data the LH has absorbed is mainly music-related. Ironically, studies have shown (and these studies must have been done by folks who have not an inkling of musical knowledge)
that people who show a proclivity for musical theory and performance tend to be excellent math scholars. I am living, breathing proof that for me, these are the polar opposites. HA!
My mother tends to brand me as a 'prodigy.' Now, prodigy to me means that cute little car made by Mazda driven mainly by college students and starving writers. I am/was no musical prodigy. I simply had the inherent ability to play any song I've ever heard. I'd learn to play the song *first, then I would learn the sheet music, altering here and there what I thought should have been changed. That doesn't mean i'm a genius. I do have perfect pitch (something I lost after giving birth but regained.) I do have the knack for memorizing pages and pages of music, mentally photocopying each page so I can 'flip through' the score and reference any given bar. I didn't know that how most musicians *don't* retain memory; most do it by touch. I do both, and my tendency to do the mental page-flip is stronger than the compulsion to feel my way across a keyboard if I miss a note. Who knew?
Well....back to the math thing. Today in class we were given a test to show more or less what we know. Basic stuff--the addition and multiplication--was small potatoes for me. Throw in the counterparts subtraction and division required a little more effort. Mix in letters and integers and parentheses, brackets, little pointy thingys that look like single quotations and I'm in fucking Siberia, man.
With God's grace and hopefully divine interference, I will get through this class with AT LEAST a C, which would shame me 8^(
Someone told me that I have such trouble with math because I have such a hatred for it that I've blacked any possible route to learn it. Bull puckey. I hate math because it hated me first, in the form of a sadistic dried-up bag of a teacher named Mrs. Wells who used to shame me in front of the entire third-grade class. Called me lazy while I stared at the math book in tears and confusion. Everyone thought that because I was a super reader taht I should have been adept in math too. It took many years for me to convince my teachers and my mother that I was not lazy, that I didn't understand what I was supposed to do with these problems. So much for pathos *shrug*
posted by Jules K at 8/17/2005 10:50:00 PM
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