My Dad and his Numbers

My dad loves math. 1

He is not, however, a mathematician.2

No.3

Math is his hobby. He does it for fun. 4

I have always been very good at math. (A fact that thrilled my dad to no end…) 5

It used to be that whenever I would come home from school, my dad would ask to see my math homework. 6

Fine, okay. 7

After I would show him that I knew what I was doing, he would say something like, "Oh, and there's this neat trick that I'd like to show you..." 8

Three hours later, he would still be lecturing me about all of the crazy and wonderful things you can do with numbers. (Shudder) It’s not that I minded learning all of his fabulous mathematical secrets- I really didn’t. I just didn’t want to learn them all in one sitting. My attention span is, after all, of limited duration (and was even more so when I was a child.)9

I missed the day in school when they taught long division. No problem. My dad was on top of it. Sooner than you know it, I was the star of my class when if came to long division. Later, when my younger brother missed the same class, it was I who took a turn being the family math guru. (He was also a very quick study at long division.)10

I remember another occasion, when I was maybe eleven or twelve. My excited father tracked me down to tell me some ‘exciting news’. What was this special thing- this amazing discovery? 11

I’ll bet that you wouldn’t be far off if you guessed. 12

Yes. That’s right. It was about math. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. I thought from the tone of his voice that it was going to be something fantastically interesting and fun. Maybe we would go out to dinner, or on vacation. Maybe we’d go see a movie, or even just rent one. I was caught completely off guard when he waved what looked like a math test in front of my face.13

A math test?14

Yes. My father had found a copy of an old SAT test. (The math section, of course.) He very gleefully sat me down to write it at the kitchen table and hovered as I filled out the answers. One I was finished, he tore off with the test and began to score it. He was ecstatic with my results. His eleven year old (or was I twelve? I don’t remember.) daughter had scored over seven hundred on an SAT.15

I don’t know why he was surprised. I’d fully expected to do well. Wouldn’t you after studying mathematics for three hours every night whether you wanted to or not?16

It wasn’t even just during school.17

Once on a vacation (Christmas), he gave me a sheet of paper covered in numbers. It was pi calculated to hundreds of decimal places. Once I was comfortably situated, he told me to follow along as he recited the numbers from memory. He has a shockingly good memory for numbers. Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be.18

Christmas was not the only holiday to be swallowed in a sea of numbers. No. My summer vacations were comprised of ‘mock classes’. What was the difference between mock school and the real thing? Well. Actually, I’m not sure. I suppose only that my mock school grades are not to be found anywhere on my permanent academic record… 19

Anyway.20

Oddly enough, I never found any of this strange. If any of my classmates had ever questioned me about my father’s mathematical peculiarities, I would simply have looked at them blankly and wondered what they were going on about. Math was a way of life in our home. Or at least it was for my father and I. 21

My brother, on the other hand, was not nearly so accepting of my father’s tyrannical mathematics regime. He tells me that he used to refer to our dad among his friends as the “Math Nazi.” He says that dropping Calculus was the smartest thing he ever did. 22

Maybe I should have thought of that.23

Needless to say though, I very quickly learned to RUN whenever my dad started talking numbers. As far as he knew, in high school I finished all of my work in class. And “forgot” to bring my books home…24

Actually, for the most part, I just stopped doing my homework. I was sick of math. Wouldn’t you be? I went to class and wrote my tests, but I consistently had the worst homework record of anyone in any of my classes. No wonder I was never on the honour role.25

Sigh.26

You may think this is funny now, but just imagine if you'd lived through it... 27

Anyhow, in spite of my current aversion to math, Statistics was the absolute highest mark that I earned in University. Doesn’t that just figure? Everything was so easy. There wasn’t a single thing we covered in that University stats class that I hadn’t already learned years before from my father. Maybe that’s a good thing, but maybe it isn’t. I found Statistics class to be very boring. Maybe if I hadn’t been so thoroughly soured on numbers by that point, I would have enjoyed myself.28

And maybe I wouldn’t be applying to an art school now…29