Agnes by Tony Cochran for May 07, 2017

That is a reasonable thought.

You never know!

I hated arithmetic, .. didn’t “get” 9th grade algebra, and dreaded it…

double hated 10th grade trigonometry….

But my kind, funny, and gifted 11th grade math teacher made me love geometry…

then talked me into taking his 12 grade calculus class cos it was about forms and graphs and shapes….

Thank you Mr. Parr, wherever life took you.

From that, I grew up to be a person who, while it wasn’t my career, has tutored high school and college algebra (which i almost failed, myself, in high school) …

and designed a short one-on-one course for math-phobic adults,

convincing them of the skills they already possess,

so they could start fearlessly balancing their own checkbooks for the first time ever.

My own past fears taught me what they needed.

Maybe Agnes will one day have a revelation too.

I suffer from dyscalculia; numbers mean nothing to me. If I have to write a check, I need to copy the figures off the receipt. But, I read at a college level in the fifth grade. You can’t be good at everything.

In 6th grade I read The Lord of the Rings, Huck Finn, The Illiad, The Odyssey, and Rise and Fall of the ThIrd Reich for fun. In my 50s, as a substitute teacher, I could teach math up to about 5th grade, after that I was lost. My head just doesn’t work that way.

I love this Agnes. Yes, letters are great but we need those numbers too. Just don’t like the numbers on my scale. I love both reading and math. I enjoyed algebra but not so much geometry. And that was as far as I went.

Sshhh. Let’s not let Agnes know about algebra – combining letters with the numbers!

The first two panels parse into quite a good poem. Agnes has the imagination and skill with words to be a writer.