I was not prepared the day I met algebra in my 8th Grade math class. Hell, I wasn’t even in the neighborhood of being prepared the day I found out math didn’t mean numbers!

I do not believe I was the only one in class whose head started spinning on his shoulders as our math teacher told us the following was an equation, and wrote on the blackboard.

a + b = c

What?! What happened to the numbers? This is math. Math is about numbers, or so I’d thought.

If math was now letters too, what on earth was waiting for us in English class. Maybe the teacher would teach us not to use vowels or and perhaps avoid the use nouns while we’re at it.

The math teacher says, “Children, if “a” equals 5, and “b” equals 6, how much is “c”?”

If you ask me, then and now, the answer is 11, not “c”.

I spent my time in a grammar school math class learning genuinely helpful forms of knowledge: addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, decimals, fractions, and so on. And because is was math class, we used numbers.

Needless to say, or perhaps not, I never mastered algebra. And don’t even get me started on the debacle experience of the “New Math” of the 1950s-1970s. Eight to the third power…ugh.

Two plus two equals four. Now that I can live with.