I am excessively proud to find that I have something in common with ita's mother, being all per-crappity at the fancy maths but very good with arithmetic. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, fractions, decimals -- I have a weird love of playing with them all: it's like having a boxful of cute puppies doing cute puppy tricks. In certain moods, the magical multiply/add-the-digits/collapse tricks 3's, 6's and 9's perform on command seem cuter to me than babies.

Given which, I really should be able to balance my checkbook a fuck of a lot better, though that's really a laziness problem, not arithmetic.

Anyhow, I have something in common with ita's mom, and it's not about lab animals, and this makes me happy.

ICompletelyON, someone please tell me to stay away from the letters section of Salon.com. That's some seriously fucked-up craxyland, there (annoyingly, complete with equal doses of craxy from both the right and the left), and I need to not look at it. I love Salon and want to keep enjoying it and it's creeping me out that I share reading material with these people.

I'm totally not proud of the fact that I suck at math. I am proud of the fact that I not only rocked geometry in tenth grade, I actually enjoyed it.

Anything higher than algebra just ... it's like another language to me. I tend to be a visual learner, so maybe it's the fact that I can't picture what X is supposed to stand for or whatever.

In the spirit of "ooh, look, a train wreck", is there a particular bunch of letters we're supposed to be keeping you away from?

I only went as far as precalculus—apparently I had a fair talent for it that I could have exploited if I hadn't found math to be the most boring subject ever. My freshman precalculus teacher told me I'd make a good mathematician if I chose to pursue it, but I couldn't imagine a career I'd get less satisfaction from.

I had real trouble with the logic parts of geometry, the same way that I have difficulty telling left from right unless I'm able to point or act out what I am doing. On a page, a math proof looks equally plausible from every angle to me, which is why my proofs ended up being 100 lines long -- I just couldn't see the short answer right in front of my eyes.

I'm told I'm a bit of an overthinker.

I did OK in algebra II, but theory, while it didn't exactly trip me up, came to seem pointless. I asked here a while ago about cosines and tangents, because, although I'd learned a fair amount about them, I had no idea why anybody would need to know about them. To me, they were just funny symbols on a page, and a button on a calculator. Finding out that they're useful for measuring how tall a mountain is, without needing a really really long string, helped me immensely.

So pre-calculus got an annoyed shrug from me, whereas statistics I did pretty well with. Although I've forgotten a lot of how to compute stats (and never formally learned advanced stats, like ANOVA), at least I know generally what to look for, and how to tell whether they actually support the argument they're claiming to support.

(There is a prof at Tufts who teaches a non-majors math course where the subject matter is all baseball. If I'd been offered that course at 16 -- and if I'd been a baseball fan yet by then -- I think I would have gotten a lot farther in math than I did. The intrinsic mathiness just wasn't winning me over, you know? I needed some applicability with my mathiness. To this day, I remember the factorial button on a calculator, because that is how you find out interest on a bank account!)

Anything higher than algebra just ... it's like another language to me. I tend to be a visual learner, so maybe it's the fact that I can't picture what X is supposed to stand for or whatever.

Huh. I tend to "see" all math in a visual sense. Especially integral and differential calculus. (A college calc prof. once complemented me on my nice chalk drawings of homework problems.)

My guess? The piece about mom, son, and hip-hop. Because I fucking loved the article and the nasty letters she got made me want to beat someone. Not that I take breast cancer moms personally or anything. And I want to assign them all book reports, too. Bastards. That was like, MWT old-school, and I've been missing it. ETA: And we joke about breast cancer on occasion, no matter how "inauthentic" one letter-writer found it. Keep it real, Camille.

In the spirit of "ooh, look, a train wreck", is there a particular bunch of letters we're supposed to be keeping you away from?

Well, I am manfully, or womanfully, not providing direct links because I'd have to go back there to do it, but the biggest trainwrecks are:

• The letters responding to an article about the end of the honeymoon between the USian Jewish community and the religious right (chief offender, a 20-year-old named Elizabeth Montague)

• The letters responding to a blog entry in Broadsheet about creepy Amazon user reviews of Maureen Dowd's newest book (chief offender, Elizabeth Montague, but with a disheartening number of totally fuckheaded, skin-crawly supporters)

• The letters responding to a thoughtful and moving article by Camille Peri about her battle with cancer, her older son's response to this and his movement into adolescence and young-manhood and trying on new identities and new social circles (so many offenders, so many people who apparently either can't read at all or flat out can't be arsed to, but instead just scanned the article for rant-inducing keywords and jumped up on their soapboxes)

(eta: yep, erika, that article. The letters are just making my brain stutter and gibber with rage.)

Multi-track trainwreck. SO BAD. This is what comes of opening the LTE section to any and all (now you can just write a letter and post it like that, instead of submitting it and hoping it gets selected). Craxyland.

I loved everything about math in high school, and then dropped it completely in college because my schedule just wouldn't allow it. At this point, any math skills I have left are purely theoretical -- I can kind of understand math when people talk about it, but I've forgotten how to do almost everything.

I am the reverse of ita's mother. My head doesn't hold arithmetic for shit, but once you get into the more complex stuff and let me use a calculator, I'm not half bad. My lack of arithmetic ability frustrates the hell out of me, as does my inability to learn foreign languages. I think they're connected.

However, given that my father dual majored in math and physics and taught both, I can't say I had any parents bragging about how bad they were at math. Rather, I had one who complained about how people who didn't know calc were losing out on one of the world's major languages, and another who loved to talk about how good her spouse was at math.

In the late 1980's, John Allen Paulos, a mathematician at Temple University, wrote the best-selling book "Innumeracy," which examined mathematical illiteracy and found it to be rampant.

That book, on the other hand, made me want not only to throw it across the fucking room, but to brag and brag about how bad I was at math before going and beating up some math geeks. It amazing to see how much Paulos missed the point he was attempting to make. I suspect he's not made of human parts.