Sandwich of Ruin!

By The Numbers

There’s a dirty little secret shared by, roughly, 105 percent of print journalists, or those who dabble in the written word, or “wordsmiths,” as I like to think of myself. The dirty little secret is this: we’re just plain terrible at math.

Okay, I really shouldn’t speak for such a vast majority of writers. It’s probably more accurate to say that I, personally, am just plain terrible at math. Whereas I’ve always had a strange innate aptitude for writing, I’ve always just basically stunk at math.

There were warning signs early on that numbers and I didn’t get along. For example, in first grade, when I was first introduced to such maddening concepts as addition and subtraction, my class was given the option to use adding and subtracting visual aids. The visual aids, in our case, consisted of plastic sticks that were about the length, width and shape of Kit-Kat candy bar segments. The idea was that we’d take, say, seven plastic sticks, add five more plastic sticks, and then count up the total sticks to come up with an answer which, if my math is right here, should be 12.

Now, all the students, initially, made use of the counting sticks, but as the weeks went by, most of the children managed to ween themselves off the sticks, graduating instead to using their fingers or, for the most gifted youth mathematicians, calculating answers in their heads, which seemed a little bit like witchcraft to me at the time.

Then there was me. Or, rather, there was me and the counting sticks. We were inseparable, those sticks and me. While most of the other students were counting away with their fingers or crunching numbers in their nimble little brains, there I sat at my desk with a mountain of counting sticks. Let’s see. . . five sticks, plus seven sticks, plus four sticks, plus six sticks equals. . . counting, counting, counting. . . 22 sticks! To say the process was time consuming would be a great understatement.

Whether the teacher subtly suggested that I step away from the counting sticks, or whether out of sheer embarrassment, I eventually moved away from my beloved sticks, but I think it’s safe to say that I used my fingers for far, far too long after that. Heck, I still find myself using my fingers to count, from time to time.

Unfortunately, graduation requirements went far beyond mere addition and subtraction so, by the time I was in ninth grade, I was dealing with algebra, geometry and a slew of other mathematical disciplines that I could never honestly envision using in real life.

Thankfully, however, by ninth grade, teachers were encouraging students to make use of scientific calculators which, as far as I could tell, were super high-tech versions of my beloved counting sticks. I went out and bought the most advanced scientific calculator I could find, which turned out to be a mistake, because it was stolen about two weeks later, which I’m still kind of bitter about, but whatever.

It wasn’t until my senior year spent in Tokyo that I realized just how mathematically-challenged I truly was. Most of the students at St. Mary’s Int’l School in Tokyo, I believed, were taught math as their first language, around the age of three weeks or so. At three weeks old, I was most likely drooling a lot and making a good pants so, in Tokyo, I was way out of my mathematical league.

Although I knew, in order to survive my pre-calculus requirements in Tokyo, I would need a top-of-the-line scientific calculator, I also knew that that simply wouldn’t be enough. I needed a calculator that would also make it possible for me to cheat in some new, important and covert ways. So, I spent a considerable amount of time shopping for just the right scientific calculator.
I finally found a calculator that permitted the user to save a small amount of information in the memory, which was remarkable for calculators in 1992. Although the information in question was supposed to be personal phone numbers and the like, it didn’t take me long to figure out that I could also save long and detailed calculus formulas instead of phone numbers.

Debra Messing. Debra Messing. Debra Messing. Debra Messing. Debra Messing. Debra Messing. Debra Messing. Debra Messing. Debra Messing. Debra Messing. Debra Messing.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time painstakingly typing in calculus formulas so I could easily access them during assignments and tests. In retrospect, if I had spent half as much time trying to memorize the formulas as I did saving them to my calculator, I’d probably be working for NASA right now. Nevertheless, my covert cheating methods were never discovered, and they went a long ways to ensuring a solid “B” average.

During the first quarter of my freshman college year, I promptly completed my sole math requirement, and I primarily used my cheating calculator to pass the class. Since then, my math skills have atrophied to the point I can barely do long division on a piece of paper.

But, so long as my calculator works, I see no reason to worry. And I could always fall back on counting sticks, if it comes down to that.

Posted by Ryan at November 12, 2004 01:54 PM