| My Math-o-phobia |
| Dear Friends, many, many years ago when JOHNNYLEEN was just a little less fantabulous than he is now, he got uprooted right at the end of first grade. Unceremoniously, I was whisked from a beloved first grade teacher to one who was absolutely dreadful! MRS. B. was one of the most frightening creatures a six year old ever had to encounter: thank God I only had her for one month before the end of the school year! Allow me to describe for you the horror that was MRS. B. (I'll let you guess what the B stands for....hint, it rhymes with "witch"). MRS. B. was very homely and boney. Of course, she towered over all of us, her feeble, boot-licking, first-grader minions, but in retrospect she was probably around 5'4". She wore her hair pulled into the tightest bun ever at the nape of her neck which explains the consistently sour look she had on her face. Oh, yes, her nose was a thing of nightmarish crookedness that reminded me ever so much of the Wicked Witch of the West. And I seem to recall a wart on it. Well, my dear Readers, in this particular school they were doing something called "New Math" whereas I had learned "Old Math", I guess, in my previous school. (If Old Math was good enough for the Ancient Egyptians to build pyramids with, then it should have been good enough for us!) At any rate, I just could not understand this New Math which seemed to consist of randomly placing numbers in columns. Well, MRS. B. would have no misunderstanding in her class, so she berated me as often as she could for not grasping the concepts. (She once screamed at another kid for having the audacity to throw up in her class.) Once she even kept me after school to work with me individually, but to no avail. How well I remember the moment that she finally threw up her gnarled hands in defeat and said, "JOHNNYLEEN, the problem is that you're just too stupid to get this." Well, I was quite put out because I had been doing very well in math before I was put into her wretched old class. Believe me, she made me feel very unfantabulous and to this day I quiver when having to add 2 and 2. The interesting thing is that MRS. B. once stood up in a PTA meeting and told all of the parents how much she hated their children and that their brats had caused her to have a nervous breakdown. But that was the Souf' where teachers reigned supreme and even the parents were afraid of them. So there's my tragic tale of my math-o-phobia. But everything was not lost......I went on to become fantabulous! And MRS. B.? Well, she's dead. Go to important matters Go back home |