Eh, I dunno. I had a teacher in high school who was a lot like you. He loooooved math. He got excited about math. He jumped up on desks and waved his arms around when he talked about math. He drew beautiful graphs on the board. He won national teaching awards and he inspired his students to become math teachers and engineers and honest-to-God rocket scientists. If there’s anyone who ever successfully preached the sacred gospel of math, it was that guy.

But I’m not mathematically inclined. I’m just not. I tried to believe in imaginary numbers. I tried to care about what x was. But I just really wanted to be somewhere else, reading a book.

So that guy, that teacher, fell back on the purely practical. “Fine,” he acknowledged to me. “You need three years of high school math to get into college. You’ll need some basic geometry to do the kind of art I know you like to do. You need a solid grasp of fractions for everyday stuff like cooking. If you don’t apply yourself more conscientiously to algebraic principles, the door will probably be closed to a STEM career for you, but I suspect you already know that and are okay with that. Am I right?”

He was right on all counts, and I appreciated his honesty.

Even the best teachers have to leave some of the children behind sometimes.