Two Plus Two

When I was assigned to spend a year teaching in a drop-out prevention program, I was asked to teach a class of 10th grade general math. I had never felt comfortable with math, had taken only the basics in high school and college and had certainly never gone beyond trigonometry. In fact, I had always allowed myself to be intimidated by math beyond addition and subtraction. However, I convinced myself that certainly I could handle a tenth grade class of general math. My other classes were English, a science class, and a social studies class. Druing the year that I taught in that program, my favorite class turned out to be the math class. Whereas a theme in my English class was elusive and could be most anything if the student could justify it, math had specific answers. Either you got it right, or it was wrong. It was like a puzzle. Sometimes you were even given the answer and had to determine the process as to how to get to the answer. Teaching math that year took away my math-a-phobia and taught me an appreciation for mathematics.