That's all 20 fingers and toes plus 2 arms, 2 legs, 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 elbows, 2 knees and 2 feet. When I was little, I remember hearing "How old are you little girl?- and struggling to hold down that pesky pinky finger with my thumb and get those other three to stand straight up. When I was four I could count to 20 and knew all of my ABC's. And at that time, numbers and letters were exclusive. By the time I was five, I could count to 100. Then we moved to Texas, and over the summer I learned to count to 100 in Spanish! I thought it just couldn't get any better.
I entered the first grade excited about all the prospects of learning new things. Over the next few years, I learned that all these numbers I knew could be manipulated through addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. They threw in decimals and percentages, and somewhere along the way, they even started mingling and interchanging letters and numbers. That didn't shake me too much, though. I was pretty much your basic, well-rounded, A-B student. And I was happy in the comfortable world of understanding. .
Then I got into high school and it got more complex. Geometry, ok. Makes sense for the most part. Algebra? We're getting into way too many letters and not enough numbers. By the time they got to proofs and theorems, I'd been kicked off the "bus of understanding- and was struggling behind on the "bicycle for mathematical delinquents-. To make matters worse, it was at that point that the schools decided to separate the students into academic categories and life goals. By this time, my interest in math had turned to a seething dislike. I turned to the arts and spent all four high school years starring in plays, participating in various UIL activities and working for a living. My senior year in high school, I started a student peer tutoring program for extra credit. It was great! The idea was for upper classmen to tutor freshmen and sophomores in subjects that had been a difficulty for them, in hopes that whatever helped them to overcome their fear or difficulty would help their peers.