I was, and still am a disaster in math, unless money is owed, or if I need to frame some art, then I’m sharp as a tack. My math teacher, Archie Williams was one of a handful of positive teachers I had at Drake High School. Did I learn foundations of algebra? No.
But I held his Olympic medal in my hand and learned about Hitler and racism in America. I loved and adored Archie. I hated how disrespectful the class was. Joey Doyle’s spitwads and Rodney Warnerhoff’s rubber band missiles and lame paper airplanes. A sign of the times.
I remember Archie, who was also a former Tuskegee pilot, picking up one of those failed paper airplanes scribbled with bad math homework from the floor and turning it into a teaching moment. He refolded the plane, gave it a bent nose, and talked about aerodynamics— lift, force, and thrust. Then let loose the plane that sailed like a hungry gull in the late afternoon classroom.
Was he also delving into geometry? Probably. Like I said, we got much much more than foundations of algebra with Archie. I wrote about Archie many times. I can’t say the same for my other high school teachers.
“My ab-fab foundations of algebra teacher, the late, great Archie Williams was a real Olympic champion. Archie won the 400-meter race. I got to hold his Olympic gold medal. I sucked at math, but Archie was the kindest, gentlest mentor I ever had. Not his fault that math didn't take. Oh, but the stories he told us, of winning the Olympics, of running with Jesse Owens, and meeting Hitler. At 13, we hardly knew who Hitler was, but we held that same gold medal that Hitler bequeathed to Archie. Archie was a a man who broke world records, and race barriers.” Olympic Pride, American Prejudice
During the 1990s, I had to take the CBEST test and, as expected, I passed the literature aspect with flying colors. I utterly failed the math portion, but I expected that, no surprise there. So, I began my retro homework in earnest with third grade math workbooks, as that’s where I fell off the learning wagon, the year I learned to read. A year of either, or—not both. I clearly did not operate on the proscribed learning timeline. I was madly marching off to my own drummer. I was gifted at art, something that was of no value within our culture. Education had failed me. Writing would come much later.
Determined to pass the CBEST, I had notions of becoming a certified teacher in those days, I worked my way through those old math workbooks. My head hurt in new places, and I literally cried my way up to the sixth grade level. Then, because I was stuck, I found a woman tutor on Craigslist, who was getting her MA in math and needed a guineapig for her dissertation. She was fascinated by my quirkiness, as I was pretty unschooled, as it were.
She had me approach geometry and algebra problems—unschooled as I was—to see how I would approach them—and she discovered that I was bored with lower math, plus I had a form of math dyslexia as well. Though I didn’t get the answers right, I was approaching the concept of higher math correctly. In fact, she was fascinated by how I was resolving the questions, I was innovative, and quirky, at best. I passed that CBEST test second time around. Not with flying colors. But solid.
Passing the CBEST was a big deal, healing an old wound, as I was a whack job math student. Who knew I had dyslexia in math as well? I’ve been known to add and subtract sums in the same column without even catching the error of my ways.
Ironic, as the math gene runs in the family—my mother‘s cousin, who grew up in Austin Nevada, was a bona fide math whiz. She disappeared after high school. Government job. We never knew would happen to her until much later. She sent us a postcard from places like Alamogordo, White Sands, Chicago. Decades later, after she had died, we found out she was a mathematician working on the Manhattan Project.
Revised from a Facebook post, from the comments for the same one on learning to read, 1/21.
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