by PIBarrington

Created on: April 09, 2007   Last Updated: May 14, 2007

Satire:
Loss of Innocence

Unlike many people, my loss of innocence' did not occur with a first sexual experience, it came with an algebraic realization. For the first third of my life, I was rewarded for my mathematical attempts with huge red "F's" slashed across my homework pages by teachers whom I can only assume were expressing their frustration with my total lack of comprehension. Of course, if that were to happen nowadays, there would be an enormous psychological abuse' lawsuit against the entire California school system, unlucky me!

For years, I struggled with mathematics, driving tutors and teachers beyond distraction, sometimes taking them almost to the point of tears. Yet no one cried more tears than I did. I considered myself a complete idiot, unable to make sense of the abstractness of the calculations. What I felt then was nothing compared to the most traumatic class of my entire school-age education. It was my freshman algebra class. I learned to speak Latin and Greek easier than figuring out what exactly what was expected of me during an algebra test. Now, if you think you cannot figure out algebra, let me give you a bit of my algebraic logic.
When presented with a calculation on a test, oh, say X=1 x 4x=? (and I don't even know if that's a real calculation and never will) I was so confused and frustrated that I figured, literally, "Hey! I haven't used an m' in a long time, what the heck! I have no idea what I'm doing; I might as well use an m' as the variable'!" Moreover, I would put an X= m', or 4x= m', or whatever.
It didn't matter. Nothing was going help my grades anyway. I also must tell you here that I went to several private Catholic schools that my mother scrubbed floors to pay for, so I really tried my hardest. In addition, this effort was not lost on my poor poor freshman algebra teacher. At one point, he even begged my mother, "Please, please tell her to just turn in her homework! I can give her a passing D' legitimately if she just turns her homework IN! It doesn't have to be correct."
By that time though, I had given up. I didn't bother turning papers in, right or wrong. I had no hope. I was the most stupid, idiotic, incapable of comprehending what the rest of my class apparently had no problem grasping human being that existed.

I didn't even cry anymore. I was way beyond that. I was in the black hole of algebra, lost to the rest of the mathematical universe. I figured I must be so stupid, that no one could stand to speak to me. I obviously

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