I’m warning you now, if you are part of the not-so-elite group of people that don’t always get along with numbers, there’s a group dedicated to hating you. This is only a mild exaggeration. But I know there are other people out there who find letters and words easier to work with than numbers. Working with logic and math formulas apparently means you’re not going to be encouraged to ask questions or apply them to real life. In fact, if you’re bad enough at math, they stick you with an online course as if interacting with a robot can make me know the truth behind x = [ 2z – 3y].

I’m bound to two hours a week in this classroom, as well as expected to spend a total of 70 hours on this course in my “free time”. I just want to know why it costs more money to take this class if you don’t have a credit card, and why I’m going to fail because I got my computer for free and it just happens to say “incompatible with programs plug-in” every time I try to log in at home. I don’t even know what a plug-in is. Our free time is limited since most of us work, and it is generally void of any desire to compute numbers for no reason. Somehow it is still expected of us to pay money to take a class (in my case, a class in preparation for a “real” math class, meaning I’m not even getting math credit) to meet these requirements. This boggles my mind, because there aren’t required political education or “how to pay your taxes” classes. They’re confident knowing we’ll discover how to sort through biased media on our own, but a girl can’t even get a freakin’ credit around here unless she can solve for x.

One rule you might have to remember to be good in English is “I before E except after C, or when it sounds like long A as in neighbor and weigh”. This rule is both enjoyable and safe to say out loud. People might hear you and think you’re learning a new language and trying to pronounce or spell a word correctly. Apply caution if using its mathematical counterpart out loud: “Division of fractions, don’t ask why, flip the second fraction and multiply”. Why would you ever need to know that in real life? Maybe a scientist or mathematician might, but I’m at a point in my life where I know neither of these applies to my future, along with many others being forced to meet math credit requirements.

Which brings me to my point. The only thing alright about math class is they usually don’t care how long you take to answer just as long as you’d bet your life on being right. A good friend once said, “Without people there would be no numbers”. Speaking and writing is how humans relate to humans. Numbers make you friends with no one but computers. I don’t know about you but I don’t hang with my computer in my free time and most of the time it hardly works right at all. So I guess this is it. They’ll continue making students pay to get educated by computer courses that don’t count and probably won’t apply to life post-graduation. Just don’t expect everyone to take the “requirements” seriously or start replacing our fun time with “technology bonding”.