of memories and geometry

Good morning friends, our friend Willy sent me a informative note regarding the size of Mars and how it could never look in the sky the size of the moon…..oh, I love it when I am set straight….that was a silly entry I wrote….but, what his note did evoke in my mind were a whole set of memories about geometry class and mathematics in general.

I was a slow starter on the math freeway.  I can remember in elementary school, we had 2 math work books.  One was a booklet for actual math problems and one was set in a format that was math story problems.  I can still remember the sinking feeling every time the story problem booklet was passed out….no reading comprehension I suppose or the ability to transfer information into numbers was my problem.  Whatever, I was pretty hopeless.  What pulled me thru school I guess was my language abilities and I must have  had  some reading comprehension as I usually  aced thru  English, History, and Language.

Skip to high school now and I remember struggling thru  Algebra 1 and 2….Ugh, once  I had to have my Mother sign a test I  had barely passed and the teacher accused me of signing my mother’s name.  I was such a straight and narrow kid that  that deception  would have never entered my mind.  In 10th or 11th grade Geometry was the set math class for college prep kids.  Our football coach was the geometry teacher.  I could never figure that out.  Probably he was a super jock, a football star and a star student.  Anyway, he saw right away how some of us were really struggling with the class and he made a bold move.  A move that saved me from failure. After he was able to gauge our abilities he gathered the "slow learners" into one class and we moved at a much slower pace.  I wasn’t embarrassed by this at all as the class was full!  Slowly and precisely he taught us how to love Geometry. Theorems and postulates and axioms and laws of Geometry and miraculously we were able to grow and enjoy the "game" of Geometry.  I owe him a debt of gratitude to this day….as it was getting serious as far as maintaining a high grade average by the time we got to 10th grade.

So it goes and so it goes….now I am the mother of an adult son who is a math wiz.  An actual Rocket Scientist….a chemical engineer….who in college got a perfect score on a Calculus exam where the next highest grade was a 77…. I take real pride in that my  child could easily succeed at Math and Science when I struggled just to get thru…
Maybe it’s because I played dominoes with him when he was 3 years old?…..hehehe

Stanley is up now and the sun is shining.  This is the first year in 14 that I have actually felt overwhelmed by the heat and am looking forward to cooler days.  We are expecting thunderstorms around noon today but we will take the little pontoon boat over to the beach for a while, have our walk and lunch, let Stanley get his sun fix, and then home will come.   Have a wonderful day friends,