My favorite cartoon shows an executive speaking into the phone. He is saying, with a cross expression on his face, “ A billion is a thousand million? Why wasn’t I informed of this? ” I sent a copy to our school accountant so he would know who he was dealing with. Addition and subtraction are as far as my arithmetic skills extend, and I’m not reliable. Algebra makes my head hurt. But I use math every day. So do we all.
Counting, matching, sorting, measuring – all mathematics. From making sure that each bowl of ice cream has a spoon to go with it to stacking the shirts with the shirts and the pants with the pants, we use mathematical skills every day. I once thought math was beyond me, a galaxy to which I was denied entrance, but now, having seen math as it is taught at Karuna Vihar, I know this universe has many doors and being good with numbers is only one of them.
If God has a language, a dear friend told me, it must be mathematics. Math, he said, is all about order, balance, harmony: what else would God speak? Nothing in her creation is random; everything is part of a pattern and every part is essential to the whole. Consider the beauty of the nine times table. The worst number of the lot, it seemed to me, aged ten. Then suddenly the trick was discovered, the pattern revealed.
Disability may seem a divine miscalculation of cosmic proportions, but in math class, we see it in perspective: integers, prime numbers, balanced equations, infinity! Mysterious puzzles (my parents had been married twenty-five times as my husband and me on our first anniversary. Now that we are nearing our silver, they’ve only been at it twice as long) unravel themselves in the mathematical mind. There is a pattern to everything whether we see it or not. A negative number here has a positive counterpart there (and positive does not equal good anymore than negative equals bad).
As Albert Einstein pointed out “God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.” In the Karuna Vihar 2004 calendar, our special children teach us how to count all over again, gently reminding us that their place value has already been assigned: it’s up to us now to do the math.
-–Jo Chopra
