<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" The classroom smelled like feet. It had no windows and was lit by those awful overhead fluorescents that make everyone over 25 look like an extra from The Walking Dead.  Not that this mattered to most of my classmates, who looked barely 18 and were probably wondering what the old lady was doing in their community college pre-algebra class. But none of this was as uncomfortable as what was facing me on the whiteboard: a long, complicated mess of an equation, full of parentheses, exponents, and negative signs. Somehow I had to come up with the answer. I bent over my graph paper and started to calculate. All too soon, the professor called time and began walking around checking our results. I was in the second row, so he got to me quickly. I pointed to my solution. &amp;quot;That is correct.&amp;quot;  None of my friends and family understood why I&amp;#039;d suddenly decided, at age 38, to revisit high school math.  &amp;quot;Why would you do that to yourself?&amp;quot; my friend Nina, an attorney, asked over lunch, her eyes wide as she sipped her pomegranate iced tea. &amp;quot;Because I got sick of believing I suck at math,&amp;quot; I replied. We&amp;#039;ve been friends since high school, where we bonded over our love for the arts. I had always loved science and was particularly interested in astronomy but never dared pursue a career in that subject because there was complex math involved. I assumed I could never understand it. While I don&amp;#039;t regret becoming a writer, I&amp;#039;ve always been mad at myself for giving up on math. Nina&amp;#039;s dislike of math also influenced her career path. When she got to college, her Eastern European parents offered her two choices: pre-med or pre-law. She chose the latter because there was less math. Nina is just one of my many professionally successful girlfriends who, like me, gave up on math too early. These are women who speak several languages yet fret over calculating a tip, women who manage their budgets but get anxious over the more complicated parts of financial planning, leaving that to their male partners or to professionals.  Unlike me, though, these women didn&amp;#039;t have the luxury of going back to school to tackle their math demons. I only did because, a year earlier, I had left longtime newspaper job to go freelance. Unfortunately, the recession undermined newspapers even further, so work was impossible to find. My community college offered web page design courses, so I signed up for one, planning to rebrand myself as an online writer. Right next to the computer science department&amp;#039;s offerings were the math department&amp;#039;s, and it had remedial math classes, starting with pre-algebra. I got an A in pre-algebra, despite the bad smells and horrific lighting. So I signed up for algebra, then geometry, then pre-calculus and calculus. And although I didn&amp;#039;t always get As over the next three years, I did accomplish what I had set out to do: stop hating math and stop believing I&amp;#039;m bad at it. Working with numbers will probably never feel as natural as working with words, but once I get into my math zone, figuring out how many cans of paint I will need for refreshing the living room or whether changing to a new health plan with a higher deductible will save money in the long run feels every bit as satisfying as crafting a good sentence. It&amp;#039;s not that I couldn&amp;#039;t figure out these things before. It&amp;#039;s that I usually winged it and panicked. Now I can be precise and feel confident that I got it right. I only wish I could tell my 12-year-old self. I had just finished sixth grade when I decided math was my enemy. It had been a tough year, full of all the tween indignities of middle school, such as kids hating you for no reason and being treated like a kid but expected to act more adult. Ironically, my final math grade wasn&amp;#039;t bad. I got a B, the same as I got in Spanish and English. But I didn&amp;#039;t also think I was bad at languages. I&amp;#039;d known I was a word person since I wrote my first poem in second grade. Since math didn&amp;#039;t come naturally, being good meant nothing but an A would do. I had fallen for what math professor (and child prodigy) Jordan Ellenberg called &amp;quot;the cult of the genius,&amp;quot;meaning I thought there was no point in even trying because math is an innate talent for only the very bright.  I wish I&amp;#039;d known then that I was far from alone and that middle school is a time when many kids start losing interest in math and buying into the genius cult. According to several reports, including a 2005 one by the Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering and Technology, and one in 2006 by Girls, Inc., middle school girls are particularly susceptible. Middle school is when they really start absorbing messages about math being for boys, because boys are supposedly far more likely to have such talent. According to a 2010 report by the American Association of University Women, girls even often think they are bad at math if they get Bs. Boys, on the other hand, think that they are good at math when they get the same grade. I was too old for Barbie by the time the talking version, with her blithe comments on math class being tough, came on the market. But I swallowed the propaganda anyway. It didn&amp;#039;t help that so many of the word problems I hated were about sports, which I never enjoyed. Or that my mother, who has never liked math and is also technophobic, assured me it was OK not to be good at math because then I could be just like her.  And then you have the teachers. A 2010 report by University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock showed that female elementary school teachers often reinforce gender stereotypes and project their own math phobias on their female students. I can&amp;#039;t necessarily say that about the women who taught me, but I don&amp;#039;t remember them being particularly encouraging either, usually letting the louder boys dominate the conversation. My middle school decision hurt me in high school. I stopped paying attention and did a half-assed job on homework and tests in seventh- and eighth-grade math. By the time I got to algebra, my poor study habits could barely accommodate the more complex subject matter. The next year, I failed geometry, because it relied a lot on the algebra I&amp;#039;d ignored but also introduced proofs, which confused and bored me. Why spend 10 sentences proving the angles in a triangle added up to 180 degrees? I also failed chemistry, since it involved a lot of algebra. By the time I got to college, I associated math with failure and got anxious about the subject. Again, it turns out this was not unusual. A 2009 study by the University of Granada in Spain showed that more than half of the college students they asked report having math anxiety, and of those, 62 percent of the women were anxious compared to 47 percent of the men. Though I had started loving chemistry because I had a great teacher the second time I took it in high school, my fear of prerequisites prevented me from pursuing a career in science. I did brave calculus my second year but failed because I hadn&amp;#039;t taken pre-calculus in high school, stopping at intermediate algebra. I struggled through the math in biology, since my college required one year of science to graduate. And I never dared to try astronomy. I majored in English literature because it involved few numbers and a lot of reading and writing, and after realizing I didn&amp;#039;t want to become a lit professor, I became a journalist. For the next 16 years, I took refuge with others who shared my hatred of math. I felt close to my editor when he told me his memories of studying logarithms made him anxious. I laughed along with the rest of the newsroom as the copy editor cursed some confusing statistics in a story. But ever since I took those community college classes, my attitude has changed. I&amp;#039;ve started seeking out numbers. I enjoy converting recipes and figuring out the changing interest rates on credit card offers. I take pride in coming in under my household budget, knowing exactly how much of the surplus my husband and I can put toward a trip or a nice dinner. I&amp;#039;ve looked into taking an astronomy course at the community college, though that may have to wait now that my writing career is taking off again. And while I&amp;#039;m still not the one who runs our household&amp;#039;s stock portfolio, I have taken a lot more interest in it and am no longer intimidated by long rows of figures.  When my girlfriends and I go out to lunch, I reach for the bill, knowing I can quickly calculate my share and the tip. And when they complain about how bad they are at math, I always urge them to reconsider.  RELATED: The 31 Best Pieces of Career Advice for Young Women Why You Feel Like a Fraud at Work 11 Things I Wish I&amp;#039;d Know About Work in My 20s Follow A.K. on Twitter. Photo credit: Getty Images "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/advice/a27513/fear-of-math/>