Freedom to Fail

Surely the most dubious distinction I (under)achieved during my sixteen-year academic career was scoring the lowest recorded grade in the history of my parochial high school on my geometry Regents.

I got a twelve.

Yes, you read that right.

Honestly, I don’t even know how I received a dozen points, unless you’re awarded that for printing your name correctly on the test paper.

You’ve probably put two and two together by now and figured out that math is not my strong suit. I did fine with basic arithmetic and managed to wing it through fractions, but after that I might as well have been deaf to the “language of the universe.” I spent countless hours, on the verge of tears or a major brain aneurysm, trying to count, calculate, measure and generally crack the code of mathematics, but it never added up to me. I clearly remember barging in on one of my brothers during his morning shaving session, begging him to help me with a particularly knotty equation, only to have him slam his razor into the sink’s shaving cream-clouded water as he tried, for the third frustrating time, to explain the answer to Little Miss Knucklehead.

At least that spectacular failure of a Regents score wasn’t due to a lack of instruction, as my brother’s fit of pique and a long line of equally vexed math teachers will tell you. So you can imagine my complete horror when, listening to a call-in show on NPR one afternoon, I heard the father of a fourth grader complain that English grammar was no longer being taught in his child’s public school. According to this dumb-founded Dad, his son’s teacher defended this non-practice by remarking that the kids would learn it “as they go along.”

By that insane logic, not only should I have been able to ace geometry and advance onto trigonometry, calculus and quantum mechanics simply by staring at equations on a blackboard, I would have been the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, and not Stephen Hawking. (Who, by the way, wrote a little tome entitled “A Brief History of Time” which topped the British “Sunday Times” best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. I’ll bet English grammar was part of his school curriculum, eh?)

Strange how we correctly believe that mathematics is a complex system of quantity, structure, space and change that needs to be actively taught, but don’t give the rules, morphology and syntax of grammar the same respect. With seven major word classes – noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, determiner – and a few minor ones like interjectors and ejaculations (naughty!), you don’t have to be Einstein to understand these are difficult concepts that are not going to be learned through osmosis. All I’m advocating is that kids be given the same shot at ringing success or spectacular failure with grammar as I was with geometry.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll set a school record of their own.