OmegaMom

OmegaMom’s childhood was spent avoiding math.

Why?

Well, although OmegaMom dearly loved her dad, her dad was a math genius, an electrical engineer, intense and driven. He liked to offer “help” with OmegaMom’s math homework. The “help” typically consisted of a two-hour long lecture on advanced mathematics concepts that left OmegaMom’s brain spinning like an out-of-whack gyroscope, confused and floundering on a sea of advanced math, when what she wanted was “here’s how to solve the problem.”

Now, logic–logic, OmegaMom loved. She used her own hard-earned money (or was that “hardly-earned”?) to purchase flimsy, cheaply-printed collections of logic puzzles, the kind with a series of statements such as, “The boy who lives in the fifth house likes green pizza; the child in the first house has long hair”, then ends with a question: “What sex is the child living in the second house, and what kind of pizza toppings does that child like?”

This love of logic puzzles helped when OmegaGranny, needing someone to hack at a BASIC program that produced output of her foodservice research in a nicely formatted manner, couldn’t get OmegaGramps to do the work (I don’t remember why). So OmegaMom gamely dove into the programs, strove to figure out what the heck was going on, and managed to muddle through.

But math or computers as a fun thing, as a potential career? Ew. (This didn’t stop her tiny high school from sticking her into a self-taught year of Algebra II, which she forthwith flunked. The only way this was redeemed was by OmegaGranny locating her a summer night class in remedial algebra at one of the local colleges.)

OmegaMom wanted to get a degree in history and write historical novels for a living. She delighted in her high school history course paper assignments, because she could invariably turn them into novelettes that explored the ideas and issues in question. What was best was that her history teacher also liked the stories–a win-win situation.

When she hit college, in addition to bowling, ice skating, and horseback riding, OmegaMom took German, English, and–to avoid the dreaded mathematics–a programming class.

(There’s a point to this post, which I am taking way too long to get to. It has to do with children learning math, concrete versus abstract thinking, the need for foundations, and the current tack of “teaching to the test” that schools are taking to comply with NCLB…Next post, will be “Part II”, I swear.)