Okay. So, I got one of those “Math Review” fold out sheets. You know what I’m talking about? They sell them in bookstores over by the Cliff’s Notes and “For Dummies” books – they’re laminated. They come on various topics that a student or someone who has need for the information might want to keep handy. “Grammar Review” “The U.S. Constitution” “Anatomy Overview”, etc. They cost about $4.00 each. The chance that anyone would be able to learn anything from them is slim, but it is possible to jog ones memory a little bit, and I imagine that they can be quite helpful as a reference. For instance, I could have used the geometry formulas when I was working in the engineering firm. I’m hoping I’ll be able to slide it in under my notepad and take it out to see if anything on it looks familiar at the time of the test.

Also, I AM reviewing it, in as much as it is possible for me to review information about which I have only the barest familiarity. The most severe problem I have working with this kind of information is that I never was able to “nail down” the order in which to work a problem, partly because of the variety of ways in which a concept can be expressed. In written language, symbols are used the same way all the time. A language is read from left to right or right to left or top to bottom, and, though there are a variety of symbols that can indicate a certain sound, the whole thing is only “going one way” so to speak. However, in math the symbols and placement on the page seem to me to be constantly changing and disconnected from anything. Letters go in a train. Numbers go in a train wreck.

For instance, in a problem where I’m supposed to multiply something, I could be told that by one of the following symbols: x, ., ( ), or by an exponent – a little number which appears to be riding shotgun on the upper right of the number I’m supposed to multiply. I could be told to divide something using: /,¸, or by another symbol they don’t even have in Word the one that looks like a sideways checkmark. Then there are hierarchies of symbols “do what’s in the brackets first, then the parenthesis….” Then I forget what’s next. By that time the problem, which you are supposed to read left to right, has now begun to run vertically down the page, reminding me of cake frosting which has gotten out of hand….and if it’s an algebra problem it’s begun to do it on both sides of an = sign. And it’s a mistake if you try to figure it out by writing down your answer the way the problem started out, that is, from left to right continuously until you figure out the answer. In order to do it “right” the problem, with all of its numbers or symbols have to float helplessly in the midst of a sea of white paper or blackboard.

It isn’t even that I can’t figure these kinds of problems out. Given enough time, I am able to come up with the correct answer. The problem is that, since the symbols and numbers don’t seem to be “attached” to anything in the way that letters or narration does, I store their meanings in the part of my brain where I store other symbols: owls or peacocks for wisdom, butterflies and eggs for resurrection, white roses for pure love, red roses for romantic love, etc. It’s an all out traffic jam on my corpus collosum as I try to get information out of the symbolic right side of my brain to combine with the logic problem on the left side of my brain while the clock is ticking or the rest of the class has gone on to something else.

I cannot begin to tell you the level of frustration I’ve had in math classes whenever I finally “got” one set of symbols to jive with a problem only to look up at the blackboard and find a whole new set of never before seen ones up there. I felt very much like my friends described feeling on their freakier drug trips. Well, maybe the whole thing kept me from getting high in high school: how much fun could it be if the whole thing was like math class?

Okay. So I’m not going to catch up on two years of high school math in three days. But I am actively doing things I know will help myself. I make sure that I use the calculator or the phone with my left hand (why this helps I have no idea…maybe it gets the numbers into the right side of my brain so they can pick up at least one symbol on their way out into the logic side?) I’m doing spatial relations type puzzles on my breaks on the internet. I’m going over basic arithmetic problems in my head in spare moments so that some answers may come to me without epic amounts of effort. I am eternally indebted to my longsuffering mother, who, after years of trying to get me to memorize multiplication tables once yelled at my brother and I, who were singing Christmas carols at the top of our lungs in the back seat of the car, “If you can remember ‘Rudolph with your nose so bright/ Why don’t you go fly a kite?’ for months and months and months why can you never, ever remember that 6x7=42!!!”

Well. I remembered it from then on.