How Algebra Ruins Lives

80% of high school dropouts cited their inability to pass Algebra as the primary reason for leaving school

F your “F.” Image courtesy of author.

I was 32. I’d long suspected something was wrong but this was a diagnosis meant for a child, not a grown woman. After eight weeks of embarrassing testing and observation, my assessment advisor delivered my results. He opened a fat file, pulled out a report, and asked what I wanted to hear first.

“I’ll take the bad news. I guess.”

“The bad news is, you have a learning disability.”

“What’s the good news?”

“The good news is, you have a learning disability.”

I didn’t expect to cry. Not at my age, and not in front of this man. But I did. All those years of being told I wasn’t trying hard enough in math, wasn’t paying attention, was daydreaming, was NOT LISTENING, didn’t care enough, was being dramatic, difficult, lazy — all those negative messages about math sunk in and contaminated my confidence. All of it.

Then the assessor, whose name was George, said, “I want to show you something.” It was a graph with numbers. Verbal and comprehension scores that reflected my ability to perform complex language-based analogies and logical reasoning. I scored high. George asked if anyone had…