"Mom, why are you going to do THAT?"

I have 3 1/2 teenagers.  This is official math.  3 1/2 teenagers = 16 year old girl, 14 year old girl, 14 year old boy, and 12 year old girl.  When I told the 14 year old girl that I was going to re-do math, Algebra through Calculus, she said, "why are you going to do THAT?"

The answer is simple: I failed Calculus.  I failed Calculus and it has always bugged the shit out of me.  Why?  Because I'm smart.  And I like science.  And when Stephen Hawking writes, it's like poetry.  And when Neil DeGrasse Jr. speaks, it's like velvet.  And despite the fact that he's dead, I think Bertrand Russell is kind of hot.  And I get more exited about Nobel Prize season than the average "Vogue" editor gets about Oscar season.  Serge Harpoche? Brill.  Shinya Yamanaka?  The bomb.

I failed Calculus, and it's downright embarrassing.  

Flunked, failed, bombed, nose-dived, failed.  It wasn't even close.  It was a shut-out.  My college freshman calculus course was taught by a 6'5", 140 pound graduate student who wore a beret to class, sipped his Chinese herb tea out of a Mason jar, and smelled like the intersection of raw garlic and armpit hair.  He also wore full length peasant skirts from time to time, but that's beside the point and the subject of a completely different blog.

I would mosey into class, plunk myself down in the first row, arrange my book, notebook, and mechanical pencil carefully on my desk, and pull my thinking cap snugly down over my cerebral cortex.  And then smelly beret guy would turn his back to me, look at the chalk board (yes, back then we had chalk boards), and proceed to teach Calculus to... well... himself.

I'm not being fair.  Smelly beret Mason jar guy was only part of problem.  And if I'm being truly honest, he was probably only about 20% of the problem (again, official math).

My math problems started long before this particular graduate student (not the only one in my life to break my heart) came into my life.

5th grade.  Mrs. Dubois.  Sitting at the kitchen table in my parents' home, shrieking in agony as my engineer father attempted to explain to me how fractions and decimals were two sides of the same coin.  "WHAT?" I would squawk.  "That doesn't make any sense!!  I don't get it!  I'm so stupid!" My poor father would sigh, rub his head, sometimes bite his fist, take a deep breath and try again.  It was useless. By then I was a lost cause; wallowing in my despair, feeling terribly sorry for myself, and determined to someday find a career that would require me to NEVER use decimals or fractions.

And so that's how it was - desperate, miserable, futile - through middle school, high school, through geometry, trigonometry, and pre-calculus.  I would pull B-s and Cs and the occassional D+, but I never failed.

Because here's the thing: I really WANTED to be good at math.  I read Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" in the 9th grade (1989) and it literally changed my life.  And from then on I wanted to be any kind of physicist.  Cosmologist, geophysicist, biophysicist, whatever.  I wanted to be whatever would make me like Stephen Hawking.

My high school geometry teacher told me I would never be a scientist, my high school physics teacher told me my math skills weren't strong enough to be a physicist, my high school creative writing teacher said I had a future in short stories and poetry, and my college Calculus teacher pounded the final nail into the coffin.

So here I am, a 39 year old mother of 4, determined to prove that I have the math chops to talk physics with the nerdiest of nerds. 

I'm starting back in 8th grade, with Algebra.  I bought am Algebra book on Amazon.com, sharpened some pencils, stole some of my kids' loose-leaf paper, and dove in.  I made it through Chapter 1-1 today and only got one question wrong.  Something to to do with integers on a number line.  But I'm optimistic, I'm determined, and I'm going to make it through Algebra, Geometry, Algebra II, Trigonometry, Pre-Calculus, and Calculus, and I'm going to kick ass.  Just watch.