X Returns

Math and I got along just swimmingly in kindergarten.  My kindergarten teacher had a box of counting bears in bright, primary colors.  I could paint a pretty picture, read an interesting book, or—entirely at my option—go and mess with the counting bears and, if so inclined, count them.  The teacher gave me high praise for looking at a fully labeled calendar and figuring out what day it was.

Within a few short years, I was thrust into a world of heartless commands like "find" and "compute" and "calculate."  Even when I could "estimate," there were strictly proscribed limits such as "to the nearest tenth."  My artistic, creative, right-brain-dominant self kicked against the pricks, but I muddled along. Then I met my nemesis.  From the day he entered my life, the academic world was divided into into two parts:  the "can-do" and the "huh?"

His name was X.  He stood for stuff. 

At first, he stood for simple stuff, as in x+1=2.  Had he been loyal to his original stance of 1, we might have been friends.  But oh, no.  No sooner did you figure out what X stood for, than he abandoned that position and adopted another, more complicated one.  Not for nothing was X called a "variable."  Overnight, X turned this formerly great student into a mediocre one.  And I thought recess/PE was hell.

That X was shifty.  Sometimes he was positive, but, too often, he got so negative that there was no living with him.  Sometimes he was rational, but he could get irrational without warning.  He got himself squared, cubed, and worse, rising to unimaginable powers.  He got cocky, built walls around himself, and demanded to be assigned "absolute value."

X could be anything.  He could be "the number of jellybeans in Jane's pocket."  He could be the point from which that damn train set out at a given speed, to be overtaken God knows where by another train from that same station, or another station entirely.  Or the speed of one of the trains could be X.  It didn't really matter, because either way, I would get the wrong answer.

X came square-rooted and in polynomials.  He had to be factored and unfactored and factored all over again.  Then he crossed paths with Y and things got really ugly.  Without a hint of fashion sense that I could see, X became a coordinate.  Now X's absolute value made at least a little sense—the further he got from the place where he and Y met, the higher it was.  I knew Y was a bad influence on X from the get-go.  Now that X and Y were in cahoots, X was an Axis power, with jackboots, in addition to being a coordinate.  I was going blind looking at paper covered with little squares, manipulating a protractor, trying to figure out slopes, midpoints, intercepts, and other manifest horrors. 

I majored in English.  When I was 20, I took my last college math class and bid X goodbye forever and ever.

Or so I thought.

Now I'm middle aged and want to take some classes—you know, expand my horizons, get some training for a different job in this suffocating economy of ours.  And whom should I encounter on the GRE prep test but my old arch-enemy, X.

For lo, these two decades I have had absolutely no need for X.

I have found that when life requires math, you can figure out the answer without resorting to anything so drastic as algebra.  For example:

1.  If your favorite pair of jeans is marked 20% off and an additional 10% off, given a sales tax of 5%, which is greater:
A) Your speed to the checkout
B) The speed of light
C) Are your kids with you?  Then A and B are about equal.

2.  How much water and buillion do you need to fudge a recipe calling for 3 cups of chicken broth when you only have two cans?
A)  Almost your coffee mug full of water, smidge of buillion
B)  Is there any milk?  Maybe that would work.
C)  Hello, Ciros?  I'd like to order a pizza.

3.  If the universal condom breakage rate is 3%, what is your probability, expressed as a percent, of getting pregnant by a single sexual encounter using only a condom as protection?
A) 85%
B) 90%
C) Book the daycare

And so, having used only this kind of math for the most recent half of my life, I was stunned to find myself contemplating problems that looked something like this:

If x equals your probability of taking a red marble from the jar and y³ equals the density of asphalt times the square root of 4.6, find your latitude (°C).

I got 11 out of 28 practice problems wrong.  With my teenager helping me.  And he had a calculator.

I am not looking forward to taking this test.

I suppose my Verbal score on the GRE will have to do what my Verbal score did on my SAT, many moons ago:  pull my drowning, gasping Quantitative score into the lifeboat SS Mediocre, so that I come out average.  Or maybe even, if there are lots and lots of analogies, slightly above average.  I rock on analogies.  Give me a question such as:

Platypus is to Yogurt as Socket Wrench is to ?

and I sigh with delight.  If only every test were comprised entirely of analogies and writing, with nary an X raising his ugly head, I'd breeze through 'em all.  Maybe now, at long last, I've seen the last of X.  I sure hope so.
 

Angry eyes clipart, courtesy of www.webweaver.nu: