DescriptionAre you frightened of mathematics? You’re not alone. By the time I was nine, I had developeda full-blown phobia. In fact, my most horrible moments in grade school took place rightbefore an arithmetic test. My terror—and avoidance—lasted well into adulthood, until theday I landed a job with a social service agency and was given the task of figuring budgets, which involvedknowing how to do percentages. I might just as well have been asked to decipher the strange squiggles incisedon the nose-cone of an alien spaceship. I decided I’d better do something quick, so I went to a friend of mine,a fifth-grade teacher, and asked her to design a short course for me.We met on Sundays for almost a year. She began each tutorial with a short lecture on the type of prob-lem we would be working with, and then provided me with a yellow legal pad and a photocopied set ofproblems—and sat doing crossword puzzles while I labored. We worked our way up to geometry that way,and on into algebra.“Mathematics works,” she told me early on. “Don’t ask why. Just do the problems. One day the lightwill dawn.
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