Janus: a two-faced god
This post is dedicated to my husband, Scott; Don, my Philosophy of Mathematics professor from library school & my stats-loving boss, Craig. Three people that can “see” math – and have patiently helped me start to see math. Most of the time with me kicking & screaming all the way. They all have made me think about math. More than I ever would have before.
Math has two faces, you know. It has its easy going, beguiling face. The one that you can always count on it to give you 2 when you solve for ‘x’ in the following equation: 5x=10. And yes, 3/6 is always the same as ½ and then 0.50.
But it hides its other face in the shadows – it craves to be understood in ways that elude me. I know that y = mx + b is ‘slope-intercept’ – but I don’t know why. In math, I hardly ever know why. I can do it, albeit slowly and methodically, but I can do it. I don’t always understand it. I don’t ‘see’ it. It’s frustrating – I want to see it. I want to be able to look at the numbers and know.
That is the Janus that is Math.
My husband is a freakin’ smart person. Really smart. He is a musician as well (I love ‘em skinny, arty and smarty). His ability to conceptualize mathematics blows me away. He reads and composes music. I have tried to learn to understand the language of music. I cannot. Any other language – I can do it. I have an ear for language…but not the language of Music. I realized it’s a math language. I’d decided to leave the math language to Scott – he’s the math yin to my language yang.
Please Note~ bad segue ahead:
It’s 1996- I’m sitting in an ‘Introduction to micro-computers ‘class my first semester of graduate school for Information Resources & Library Sciences. The professor is talking about a ‘spreadsheet’ program called Excel.
My stomach clenches. I avoid math when possible. Math & I have always had a difficult time of it together. Good memories and bad –support math, advanced math – I’ve done it all. I’m good at plugging in the numbers and following a set of steps to solve for ‘x’ – but it stopped there. No other subject caused me such grief. “Numerical Dyslexia” is the term bandied around for my constant struggle with that two-faced god. It was especially hard because I was a good student, an advanced reader; I loved grammar, languages, history, sociology, philosophy –I loved learning – except math. Never math. I hated not understanding.
I remember sitting in that class and thinking – I’ll never use Excel. I want to be a librarian – I will never use Excel. I did some lam-o exercise using months and that was it for Excel.
Then my department hired a new professor – it caused all sorts of brouhaha – he wasn’t from libraryland… he had his doctorate in Philosophy of Mathematics. Yes, people CHOOSE to study math as a philosophy! And, I believe, this was his first teaching job EVER. I was obviously suspicious of him. His first class with us dealt with organization of information…we all waited for the Math Doctor to arrive. He did – young, tall, lanky, awkward, thick glasses, sweating profusely and darting around like a humming bird caught inside a house. A bit of a nervous stutter, disjointed sentences – I loved his class instantly. I’m all about the underdog.
He let me tease him about philosophy of math – but then he also talked with me about philosophy of math. I loved philosophy – It was almost my undergraduate degree until my parents told me they were not going to pay for me to be philosophy major… I started off in Russian & Soviet Studies, then on to Philosophy, then Anthropology I finally had to ask my counselor what degree I was closest to achieving because my parents weren’t down with my wish to be a perpetual college student –Sociology & Deaf Studies it was! Whoo hoo! Anyway – I still loved philosophy and was intrigued with the idea of math as a philosophy. So it started me thinking about math.
Post graduate school and two jobs later, I was lucky enough to land my Dream Job – as a research specialist in Public Television. It was perfect. I could wear what I wanted, I could listen to music, I had my own office, I was part of the systems department, I could start work at 6AM. Everything was perfect; except I had to use Excel. YES – EXCEL! Every bloody day. That lam-o exercise I did in 1996 in Excel, didn’t help me at all…
I now love Excel. I teach people how to use Excel – ironic, eh? I like the Violent Femmes with my Excel.
My boss, Craig, has patiently sat with me to not only teach me how to use Excel, but how to understand why I do the calculations that I do. I don’t think he quite understands how I could *not* understand math nor my need to understand it – but he allows me to rant, rave, pester, question and talk about math. He laughs and shakes his head quite a bit – but that’s the kind of teacher I need.
Scott gets to listen to me drone on about my math schizophrenia. Doing it vesus understanding it. He’s a bit like Craig – he doesn’t understand how I can ‘not see’ math – but he patiently goes over it again and again and again.
Between these three people, I’ve gained more of an understanding behind my ability to correctly compute a percent difference or calculate a rating from raw numbers. Math may not ever come to me as easily as learning Russian or American Sign Language – but it is coming. I’m getting there – and I’m dragging everyone with a math brain with me.
Sounds like a perfect present for you would have been a math or Excel textbook in Russian 🙂
Но, конечно, только в том случае, если c русским языком проблем нет 🙂
hee hee – no Russian lang problems in any textbooks I’ve seen so far.
Well, as you may have guessed by my previous comment, my first math textbooks were in Russian. 🙂 And any problems I may have had with then weren’t with Russian, either.
you speak RUSSIAN?
Yes, and the more appropriate way to phrase this would be as “I speak English” 🙂
(totally phoenetic) – Ya nimnoga panamayu e gavaru pa-Ruski.
I wish they offered it when I was in high school – alas, I had to take German instead –
Oh. I was looking forward to doing a comment thread in another language. Alas, meine Deutche ist nicht gut, either.
Since high school was 24 yrs ago – and my Russian will only get us to
Hello (which, by the way, why must that be the HARDEST WORD IN RUSSIAN TO SAY?) or Hi!
How are you? I’m good!
I speak and understand English and a little Russian. Good day, good evening, good morning
and duck.
Can we make that work?
I think we can make a conversation out of that. My grandfather once had a conversation with someone simply by repeating “sorry, no English” a few times to that person.
utka! utka!
My grandmother was from the old country (Sicily in this case) and towards the end of her life, had forgotten a lot of her English and would just make up words. Her pronouns were the most interesting. “Garr’ was my personal favorite -and had multiple uses!
Garr! does that mean you might also parlare Italiano?
Sadly no – I audited Italian in grad school – but with language you have to be ‘all in’ – my grandmother wanted to assimilate so she taught no one Italian.
I have a year of French under my belt, German (which I took for 6 years and you’d never know to hear me speak), Russian (my own ‘teaching’) and I was fluent in ASL – but I fear our proximity, or lack there of, would be an issue. And English – I’m pretty ok with English.
I am still much more comfortable with Russian than with English. And thanks to the same lack of proximity, you also don’t get to hear my Russian mafia-like accent, viz vich I rite all my posts and comments.
Haha – so I take it Russian is your first language, eh? I so wish I was multilingual – I have been looking around for a community college Russian course – and then I like to foist myself upon unsuspecting Russian speakers – who must think I’m completely mental (which would be true). But how often do you get to do that – speak in another language to someone??
I was practicing my recent bout of Russian for the Red Elvises (one of my most favorite bands). 🙂
Oh yes- I took Spanish in jr high but everyone speaks Spanish…
I’m kind of at that point where speaking both English and Russian feels like I’m speaking another language.
Oh, and I think you just found a Russian speaker you can bother with questions. 🙂
Don’t make offers until you’ve experienced what it’s like to be questioned by me… 🙂 Family members used to bribe me with money to get me to shut the hell up.
суперб!
So answer me this – why is “HELLO” so freakin’ hard to say??
“Hello”? You mean “preevet?” So that you don’t start thinking that the rest of the language will be easy 🙂
I think I can at least give you a chance, and if you prove to be too persistent, I figure I can always change my name and get plastic surgery 🙂
No – that’s the EASY one.. I mean this one: Здравствуйте!
well, plastic surgery might not be necessary – I’ve never actually SEEN a List of X.
There’s an informal Preevet and a formal Dobryi den’. You don’t actually have to say Zdravstvujte if you don’t want to. I don’t think I use it that much myself.
It boggles my mind that one day I could look at this word: Здравствуйте! and the letters would actually have some sort of meaning as individual letters rather than memorizing how the word looks and attaching the sounds that I learned along side it – but there’s really nothing connecting those two things – does that make sense? I think I mean if I saw the word before I heard it, there was never any way I’d possibly get to anything close to Zdravstvujte in my pronunciation.
I think a sizable portion of Russian couldn’t spell this word correctly. However, when Russians say certain words, they don’t always pronounce every letter in it. In fact, if you say it as “Sdras-tuj-te”, they will understand you just as well
Oh great – Cyrillic alphabet with French-like pronunciation 🙂
It’s not like French: French has rules, this is just an acceptable lazy pronunciation. 🙂
Oh – now I feel much better ~
Meine Utka ist verloren! A ou vas?
Our utka is zer glucklich.
Das ist gut, ya? Meine utka ist crank –
Dobre Dien! Kak vasy dela?
Nashi dela ist zer gut, danke. Kak vashi?
Nichivo! Devy nat ti? Ha ha – I’m sure I’m not eloquent enough to switch back and forth btwn the formal and informal!
Ok, you actually lost me at “devy nat ti” – was that “where…you..something something”? 🙂
I think it’s supposed to ask if we can switch to the informal so instead of Kak vashi dela – I could just ask Kak dela… and then maybe some sort of drinking ritual to do with Brudershaft – Mango Languages told me so.
Oh, I see. You can ask to swich to informal informally as “Davay na ty”, or you can ask formally as “Davayte perejdem na ty”
ha ha – I phonetically spellllleeeded it wrong –
and you’re thinking “нет! нет!”
I was thinking more like “whaaaat?” 🙂
that’s legit too….
Oh it’s simply fantastic. I love it. I majored in Mathematics for my B.A. and minored in…wait for it…Philosophy. 🙂
NO! Not a surprise – and your MA’s are in???
What kind o’philosophy?
For the minor it was sort of a broad range of Philosophy classes, I did enjoy the logic courses in particular and then there was Philosophy of Women in World Cultures course that was a lot of fun. Bertrand Russell really appeals to me too.
I have an MBA and an MS in Management/Human Resources. My career is in the HR field so these come in handy for my work. Oddly HR is sort of a passion for me, among other things.
using that philosophy degree! My sister in law is an HR person – how she deals with all that policy for insurance and whatnot is a mystery to me.
I guess some ways I do use the philosophy. A lot of my work deals with interpreting and learning how to adjudicate laws and policies. Knowing where to be firm and where one can be flexible takes some creativity. Many days I wonder if a J.D. would have been just as useful
I was just kidding – all knowledge is valuable – I am a firm believer that things are not just related to a certain ‘subject’ – and applying knowledge and using critical thinking is the aim of education in any form.
Oh I figured it was in jest. I quite agree
I’m jestish, dontcha know.
Love it !! I have the same love hate relationship with math…
Hee hee…so many of us do! Thanks for reading and following ~
I was never very good at seeing math either and then ended up doing firing calculations for cannons for years. It was hilariously ironic.
I appreciate that irony. firing calculations for cannons… like a cannon associated with war? Should I feel less or more safe?
Feelings do not respond to commands. However, I have no wish for you to feel unsafe.
I’m just teasing
Thank goodness someone is teasing me.
I can’t be trusted to be serious ~ I’m non-traditional librarian, ya know.
Nice.
Great post. I should show this to my 7th grader who thinks math will never be useful.
Ha ha – it seems like it does come in handy. I might have to write about my spelling bee and height achievement failures in the wake of my hustle dancing friend.
OMG, I have also had a “love/hate” relationship with math. At times it has been the bane of my existance; a necessary evil. I always thought there was “something wrong with me” (well there is but that is another topic.LOL) I didn’t see math like the teachers did. A “shortcut” was the kiss of death for me. I knew it until they showed it a different way. I always got the answer right, but never did it the way they did, and so in those days you were just wrong. I was even told by my geometry teacher that I’d never “get” math. But my brain had other ideas. Incorrect math calculations would sneak up on me when I looked at a balance sheet or studied a group of numbers. In an instant, I knew something was wrong. My brain told me something was wrong. But the frustration came with “what WAS wrong with the numbers?”. Over the years I had learned to distrust numbers, so whenever my brain told me something was “wrong”, I would, at first, dismiss it. But time and time again I’ve been right, so I’ve come to trust the innate ability I have to “see math”. My math wiz of a hubbie (yes, I married one, too), marvels at my ability. The great thing is, he’s the detective to figure out where the error is, I just tell him there is one. So math and I have come to an “understanding”, albeit a cautious one.
Well, it’s not a coinkidink that we ARE related ~ we have each other’s math brain…and we KNEW we needed to love a math geek to get on the world of math!! Thanks for reading.