Mathing

When I went off to college at the ripe old age of just-barely-18, I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. How does anyone?

There are those people who know they want to be a nurse or a musician or a chef, and I kind of envy that. My college roommate (now my sister-in-law) always knew she wanted to be a teacher and she has been a phenomenal one for a lot of years that I won’t mention because wow it is very many.

I was not one of those people. Basically I went to college because that was the next expected thing on my life calendar and, being a chronic people pleaser, I could not say no.

I applied to all the colleges I’d heard of other people going to, even though I knew nothing about them. This was way before the Internet in the days of write a letter and put a stamp on it (the kind you had to actually lick—none of this peel-and-stick nonsense), send it to the college, they send a pamphlet to you, you like the pictures, you fill out a paper application with blue or black ink, include a check for $50, and mail it to the college of choice, then wait two months for an answer. In the mail. No wonder we started when we were juniors. Imagine all the fuel involved in the back-and-forthing of postal items. Kids these days don’t know how easy they have it.

I was accepted at a couple of schools I didn’t really care about, and then my guidance counselor suggested I apply to her alma mater, a very small women’s college (they get huffy if you call it a girls’ school) in Pennsylvania, about two hours from my home. “Small” sounded not scary. “Women” sounded safe. Two hours from home was far enough away but not too far. I applied and was accepted and my choice was made.

My daddy wrote a check for my first semester: room, board, tuition, and fees, $2700. (That’s roughly what I paid for one class for my children who went to Liberty University.) I bought my own books, a shocking $167 for five classes. I’d never heard of such absurdity. Fifty dollars for one calculus book? I hoped I would be able to use it for two semesters at least.

Since I had no idea what I was doing, I signed up for the variety plan: English, World History, Calculus, German, and Intro to Fine Arts, which was basically memorizing classical music pieces. The final for this class consisted of the professor dropping the needle randomly in the middle of an LP and you had to name the composition and composer. At the time I thought it was a waste, but now it’s kind of fun knowing the difference between Mozart and Clementi, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. I could probably win this category on Jeopardy and wow I sound old again.

Since all the upperclassmen had already registered for their classes, just the freshmen were left. On registration day, the line outside the registrar’s office began forming at 6 am, which some of us hadn’t seen in years. When the office opened at 8, we went in, bleary-eyed (this was before the days of portable coffee), four at a time because there were four ladies there to help.

The office walls were covered with big white poster boards, one for each available class the upperclassmen hadn’t already filled. You had your list of the classes you wanted scribbled on a scrap of paper, and the kind lady would take it and walk to the corresponding poster board. If there were still spaces in your preferred class, she added a tick mark to that class. When there were no more spaces left, that class was full and you had to choose something else. But the something else inevitably clashed with another of your preferred classes, which screwed up the whole schedule you’d slaved over and you basically had to start from scratch. It was an angst-filled introduction to college life and I vowed to get up earlier next semester, maybe even camp out on the marble floor in the hall.

Are you laughing at how primitive this process was? It reminds me of my grandmother, who was born before the invention of the automobile and lived to see a man land on the moon.

Toward the end of my sophomore year I was told I had to choose a major. I would have gladly graduated without one—I hate decisions so much. So I looked at all the classes I had already taken, figured out which major I had the most credits toward, and picked that. I am not even kidding. I might as well have done eenie meenie miney moe … here it is! Management studies with concentrations in finance and systems analysis. What is that even? To this day I don’t know, but that is the name of my degree. I’m not sure what it qualified me to do, but apparently it proved I could do math.

After college I worked in a jewelry store balancing the books and selling overpriced diamonds, then got married and pregnant in quick succession. No more jobs for me, and I was 100% fine with that. We had five children in eight years and I was the happiest stay-at-home, homeschooling mom ever. I say every year on Mother’s Day that nothing I ever do in life will be more fulfilling than the 30 years I spent raising and teaching my own children.

Part of the fun (for me) of homeschooling was trying out all the different curriculums. One of the math programs we used for middle school was called Saxon Math. If you are a homeschooler, you’ve heard of it. My kids hated it. I loved it so much, and one of the best things about it was that the student kept reviewing a concept over and over until it was cemented in their brains, or at least in their mother’s brain after teaching it to five children in succession. Probably none of my kids remember learning percents, but I’m not kidding when I say I use this equation all the time.

P over 100 equals is over of. It’s simple and it always works.

With a degree in finance and five semesters of upper-level math under my belt, I always struggled with percents until I was teaching my own kids from Saxon Math. But since I learned this formula, I can figure out any percent. All you have to do is make a question out of it: What percent of X is Y?

X is the “of,” Y is the “is,” and P is the “what percent.” Sometimes you know the X and P but not the Y. Sometimes you know the P and Y but not the X. Just plug in the numbers you know and solve for the one you don’t know using basic algebra, which as we all know, everyone uses every day, they just don’t know that’s what they’re doing. This little formula clarified years of struggle for me, and it just came in handy again yesterday.

We are coming up on the end of our construction loan, and as anyone who is doing any building right now knows, you can’t get it done in a year. It took us four months just to get someone to lay a foundation for us. So I’ve been talking to D at the bank to get an extension. While we’ve been having this conversation, she asked if we would need more than our originally agreed-on loan amount. We didn’t think we would, but she said if we did, we could include that in the extension and we’d just have to pay half of a percent on the extra $20,000. No problem, I thought. That’s not much. I told Ben it would only be $100 for that extra 20K.

So today I was double checking everything with D. Ben and I were sitting on the couch and we had D on speaker so we could both hear. She was running through everything and we could hear her adding machine going in the background, and she finally said, “So it would be a $1,000 fee if you wanted that extra 20K.”

Pause.

I said, “Okay” quietly and told her we’d let her know tomorrow.

I hung up the phone and said, “That isn’t right. It can’t be that much.” Ben said, “Sure it can. Half a percent of 20,000 is a thousand.”

Pause.

“Isn’t it?”

I got out my phone calculator and did the math. $100. I did it again a different way. Still $100.

Ben got his phone calculator out just in case my iPhone was wrong and maybe his would be right and he got the same answer. Then he got a pencil and paper and tried to do it on paper. D had said $1,000 and she’s the loan officer so she must know. It sounded right to everybody except me. We wanted to believe D but I kept insisting it was $100.

Finally I asked Siri, “What is half a percent of 20,000?” and she said, “one hundred.”

Ben Googled it. $100.

Siri and Google could not both be wrong.

We could not for the life of us understand why D got $1,000 and we kept coming up with $100, but we knew we—the peons—must be wrong and she—the expert—must be right. This lesson could be an entire post of its own, but let’s not go there now.

Picture two 60-year-olds, both college educated, one with a master’s degree, struggling with pencil and paper to figure out what half a percent of 20,000 is. I used my handy-dandy formula and just knew I was right. Algebra is never wrong. We were laughing hysterically and I was threatening to call D when my phone rang.

It was D and she was laughing too, calling to tell us that no, it wasn’t $1,000 as she’d said, but $100.

Proving for all time that I may struggle with a lot of cognitive functions since my latest concussion, but I will always be able to do percents. Thank you, Saxon Math.