Me and math: a complicated relationship

As a kid, I never thought I was good at math.

Objectively, I always had medium to high grades in middle school, but that changed when I encountered a really bad teacher in high school.

He wasn't a bad guy, but he had no control over the class. The kids were always yelling, and he couldn't really teach anything. The students were mean, and I went to a rich-bitch school. I felt and to this day feel sorry for the guy.

However, in the end, I failed that class and never really regained my footing in math.

A distant memory: I remember talking once to my dad's friend, who said that girls shouldn't have top grades in math. I must have been in middle school at the time, and I hated being bad at math even more because I connected it with feminism.

Surprisingly, in high school, I did exceptionally well in geometry and analytical geometry, so maybe I had a special eye for those things. I never really found out.

When it was time for university, I didn't perform well on the math portion of the entrance examination, and I had to pass an additional math exam in order not to take an extra class in my first year of university. Fortunately, I passed that exemption exam with ease.

'Maybe, I am good at math, just not numbers'

I recall Bertrand Russel or maybe Douglas Adams saying they weren't good at algebraic math but excelled at analytical or conceptual math. Could it be that I also fit into that category?

During my time working as a buyer's assistant for a retail chain in Moscow, Russia, I found myself in an embarrassing situation. Initially, I couldn't figure out if it was the retail system or the language (or both) that I didn't understand, as I struggled to grasp what was happening during the first few weeks. It turned out to be the retailing system.

I ordered retail buyer books from Amazon (all physical, as e-readers weren't available at the time) to help me understand the retail world better. One of the books, titled "Basic Math for Retailers," explained how to do percentages for calculating mark-ups and profit margins. That book genuinely helped me. Maybe this is a bit embarrassing because all the retail math necessitates only knowing the four operations.  

Also a few years after having graduated from university, when I lived in Russia I used online materials for elementary school children in the US to practice solving word problems. (At the time, I was preparing for the GRE). I was actually quite good after learning with these explanations, so maybe all my life, my struggles were part of not being explained math the way I would get it.

Now, at 44 years old, I'm not sure if I need a better relationship with math, especially when we have spreadsheets and AI that can handle most calculations and set up systems with the correct formulas and scripting.

All in all, I definitely wasn't created for a life of math. (or meth, luckily).