When I was in elementary school, arithmetic was probably my least favorite subject. It mostly seemed to be learning processes I thought boring and useless. That was before the time of pocket calculators and everything was done by hand and brain.
I liked reading and thinking but writing was too much like work. There didn’t seem to be much in the math area for me. In high school, I enjoyed plane geometry. I could understand when I read that Hobbes or someone felt that he was in the presence of God when he saw the demonstration that the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the root of the square of the other two sides. It was amazing that such a precise relation could exist. Analytic geometry, the extension of Descartes’ brilliant combination of what we now call graphs and numbers to geometry, was interesting but again, I didn’t think I would use it much. I was interested in good stories, clever puns and such.
In my freshman year of college, I found that my inexpensive college could work with me in three areas: elementary ed, junior hi history and English or junior hi math and science. The elementary seemed too babyish for a big guy like me. History and English sounded as though there would be a ton of boring reading. So, I selected jr. hi. math and science. As soon as I did, I was handed a list of my courses for the rest of my time at college. That turned me off. What about choice? What about intellectual adventure? Oh, if I wanted more choice, I should pick elementary, so I did. That did mean that I had to select more electives and I picked statistics in my sophomore year and math of finance in my junior year.
In my junior year of college, I had to pick a minor to go with elementary education. I had already seen that I could do math and there wasn’t a ton of homework so I went with math.
First year out of college I taught the 5th grade. Third year out, the four 5th grade teachers decided to departmentalize a bit. I wound up with math. The math of fractions, common and decimal, is pretty easy stuff but it gets a lot easier for the teacher who teaches it, explains, demonstrates it and then repeats over and over. About that time, I began both my interest in grading and testing and studying graduate courses.
I took a grad class from the school system’s director of testing, for whom I had worked as a college student. I began to get that special itch that comes over some people, often men, to get the full scoop on each of my students and to capture that essence in numbers. Soon after that, I took another course in statistics. I never recalled anything from the sophomore year class and I struggled through the first 2/3 of the class. Then, suddenly, everything fell into place. I aced the course and joined a doctoral program with plenty of statistics and spent the next 35 years teaching stat and testing.
