I Do Math Good

math

It is no secret, I suck at math. Like really, really, bad. In college, I took each math class twice since I would inevitably fail the first one. To this day, I have nightmares because I just gave up, stopped attending a class and failed (which happened). I also have nightmares that I am missing a credit or two and won’t graduate. These dreams are so real that occasionally I question if my degree is legit or not.

Alas, my degree is real and I am a buyer. I love when I interview for a position and they are like, “I know this role seems glamorous but it all comes down to numbers and analysis of demand.” When HR says this, here is what I hear in my head:

‘Fake it till you make it bitch.’

I’ll pretend I like math.

So today a vendor emailed me the following:

We are currently in the process of creating cases of the labels. That being said, there will be 20 roles in a case.

Now, originally I knew that each roll cost $10. I however, responded back with the following:

Please confirm that the new case cost will be $100.

She responded back:

There will be 20 rolls per a case so the case cost will be $200.

I then responded back:

What is wrong with me? How can I be that bad at math? You are correct. Obviously, math is not my strong point.

Later That Day

My 12-year-old came to me and announced, “how pointless is this math?”

“Lemme see it.” I asked.

“He produced a sheet of college rule paper with the following hieroglyphics:

horrible math

I looked up at him, then at my husband, then to my 9-year-old in disbelief.

“What is this?” I asked deadpan.

P went over each line and here is what I heard in my head:

‘wha, wha, wha, wha, wha, wha, wha, wha.’

The Italian usage of hands kicked in and I began to give my hand speech about why this sucked.

“Look, letters need to stay with letters,” I said as I dramatically used my hands to show that letters were in one bucket. “And numbers need to stay with numbers,” I said as I dramatically threw my hands down in another bucket.

“Yeah, we’re never going to use this,” my son chimed in.

“I know! And I bet if I asked you what an APR is, you’d have no idea.”

“Yeah, what is an APR?” He asked.

“Exactly!” I responded.

Look folks, I admmittingly tapped out of 2nd grade math. I’m not above posting my son’s math problems on Twitter, only to get a troll to explain the answer then insult me for my lack of knowledge.

But what I’m saying is, why are we teaching these useless, stupid problems to our kids? Sure, it’s super helpful for the future engineers or brain surgeons but my son is probably going to be an international soccer celebrity (j/k). Regardless, we need to be teaching them about APR, interest and late fees so when they are offered a free frisbee in exchange for a credit card application, they know well enough to run the other way.

This is 2018. Why the fuck are we teaching our kids like it is still the 20th century? Let’s remove this senseless math and teach them coding, the stock market, bit coin. It’s a new world. As a child, I typed shit up (yes, that’s how I said it as a 9-year-old Catholic girl) on a type writer. We didn’t have internet till 1999 when dial-up became an option. My middle sister, best friend and I sat mesmerized in front of the computer our parents had installed in the dining room, with a person that went by “ivory tower” when we chatted.

I still don’t even know what ivory tower means. Is it like a white dick? I don’t know.

 

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