Algebra was responsible for the first F I ever got.
While I was never a straight-A student, I wasn’t a screw-up either. But tell that to Mexican-immigrant parents who dropped out of school after first grade and took pride in seeing their offspring get the education they never had.
I’ll never forget that dreadful parent-teacher conference in seventh grade when I received that F, or the silence in our minivan on the way home.
There was no congratulatory feast at Shakey’s Pizza that night.
I’ve never passed algebra. I coasted through middle school arithmetic classes, and, in high school pre-algebra, I weaseled my way to a C by teaching my teacher how to play “Angel Baby” on the acoustic guitar.
Geometry came next, and I passed with no trouble.
Fast forward to my still algebra-less senior year in high school. Apparently, my problem with algebra was shared by many other students and posed a threat to the pristine record of my “California Distinguished” high school.
So the administrators decided to count Accounting 1 as an algebra equivalent. I passed that with a B plus.
When I entered Pasadena City College, in the hope of transferring to a four-year institution, the placement exam put me two classes below the California transfer requirement class of Statistics 50.
I wasn’t the only one with this problem; 80 percent of my fellow incoming students also place into below-college-level math, according to PCC’s research office.
Four and half years later, I still haven’t passed. I have enrolled in algebra class and failed more than once. OK, let me be honest — I’ve failed algebra seven times. I started to question my character, my brain, my capabilities, and even my values.
How was I able to write a cover story for Saveur magazine in 2011 but unable to pass a class that involved mixing numbers with letters?
Ready to break down in desperation, I made an appointment with my academic counselor.
He pointed me to an experimental class called “Exploring Topics in Mathematics.”
It promised to jump-start me into Statistics 50, the next-to-last class I’d need to complete in order to transfer. I immediately enrolled.
The class met four days a week and the 35 students enrolled were just as varied as you would imagine. Most were African American or Latino. One was Asian with tattoos. Another was a heavily made-up white Goth girl who was half an hour late every day. There was the elderly lady who was a painter and the middle-aged Iranian lady who was about to get married. All of us were math failures.
The class teacher was Professor Jay Cho, a slender, soft-spoken 41-year-old from Korea with a master’s in mathematics from UC Irvine.
“You can just call me Cho for short, or, as some of my past students called me, Notorious C-H-O,” he told us.
Cho taught us how to complete linear equation problems, something that used to give me headaches, by relating it to blood alcohol levels when you drink and drive. He used the almost-daily tardiness of the Goth girl to teach us relative frequency approximation of probability.