It’s rare that you get a chance to really see life from the other side. Today I did.
I presented at the Western Social Science Association conference at 8am. I stayed to watch the other talks – and got a serious taste of what many people feel when in a math class.
I was comfortable with the concepts.
Strangely, I was totally comfortable with the hypotheses of this group of social scientists.
I saw talks where people speculated on what was up with juvenile detention workers that liked their jobs. And I was cool with it.
I was fascinated, engaged and understood the hypothesis that people who identified with their gender, and lived that way, were more healthy than those who claimed one thing and behaved the opposite.
It made perfect sense to me that someone would want to do research to see if indeed boys who are close to their moms pray more as grownups.
I got uncomfortable when they started talking… stats!
Yup!
It was the math that got me.
At first I watched in relative peace as these folks paraded the slides loaded with positive and negative decimal numbers. I ignored my ignorance of something they deemed important called “R2.”
I told myself that if I knew what these things were, I would totally get this.
I’m an algebraist. We don’t even use numbers, much less negative decimals.
But I assured myself that I was perfectly capable, I just hadn’t learned this branch of math.
But the talks and slides kept coming.
And my defenses didn’t hold up.
Wil was kind enough to give me a cheater hint. I tried to memorize it. The rule ended up looking like this:
Positive number means “as one thing goes up, the other does too.”
Negative number means “as one thing goes up, the other goes down.”
“Big” number means it really is true.
“Small” number means it probably is just B.S.
I developed math-anxiety.
When a stat slide came up, I looked away. The speaker’s voice became Charlie Brown’s teacher. I checked my iPhone to see what was happening on Twitter.
As Wil would say, I was participating in avoidance behavior.
But occasionally I’d try…
If one of those slides came up and I didn’t turn away fast enough, I’d give it a shot.
After all, I’m a mathematician by trade! This shouldn’t intimidate me.
I would fish around desperately in my brain for that memorized rule.
And to think that just two days ago I told my students, “You can’t just follow the rules – you should understand what they mean.”
Easy for me to say.
I’m going to crawl into the tub with a glass of wine.
*sigh*
