ALGEBRA

I had my high school life planned with the precision of a military operation: take practical classes, learn practical skills, get a practical job. Simple. Clean. No nonsense. And most importantly—no Algebra.

Even the word Algebra sounded like something whispered in a dungeon. My classmates spoke of it with dread, as if it were a curse passed down through generations. Smart kids—kids who could memorize entire chapters of biology without blinking—trembled at the mention of it. For every student who understood Algebra, ten more were drowning in a sea of Xs, Ys, and symbols that looked like they belonged on ancient temple walls.

I congratulated myself daily for dodging that academic bullet.

But life, as it often does, had other plans.

I ended up in college—quite the plot twist. And college, unlike my carefully crafted high school schedule, did not care about my avoidance strategies. It demanded Algebra. Required it. Insisted upon it with the cold indifference of a bureaucrat stamping forms.

My brain, already convinced Algebra was an impossible labyrinth, offered no resistance. It simply folded. Thus began my descent into mathematical misery.

Numbers I liked. Numbers made sense. They behaved. They didn’t hide behind letters or require me to summon psychic powers to “find X.” Why were we even looking for X? What crime had it committed? And who had lost it in the first place?

I dropped the class. Then I dropped it again. Algebra, it seemed, was the academic equivalent of a horror movie villain—you escape once, maybe twice, but it always finds you.

Eventually, I heard whispers of a night class taught through little booklets instead of lectures. Booklets! That sounded manageable. Booklets were friendly. Booklets didn’t judge.

And for a while, it worked. The pamphlets guided me step by step, like a math version of “connect the dots.” I learned to flip pages and follow examples with just enough confidence to appear competent. The professor was needed only when one admitted defeat and approached him like a lost puppy. I avoided that walk of shame with the skill of a seasoned escape artist.

Somehow—don’t ask me how—I passed. With a decent grade, even. My algebraic prison sentence, I thought, was finally over.

I was wrong.

Years later, my oldest daughter came to me with a simple equation. A tiny one—barely an equation at all. And I—college graduate, functioning adult, bill payer, tax filer—could not explain it. Not even close. Thankfully, her younger sister had inherited her grandmother’s math brain and swooped in to save the day, sparing us both from my algebraic incompetence.

That was the only time in my adult life when Algebra was needed. One moment. One equation. One spectacular failure.

Yet Algebra still lurks in the shadows of my memory, ready to leap out and remind me of my intellectual shortcomings. I’ve built a life—career, marriage, children, home, car—without ever needing to solve for X. And still, the word itself haunts me.

Words are my allies. My tools. My joy. But one word I would gladly erase from every dictionary on Earth is A L G E B R A. And X and Y? They can stay at the bottom of the alphabet, where they belong.

To this day, Algebra feels like a punishment designed to humble teenagers into realizing they are not nearly as clever as they think they are. In my case, Algebra succeeded brilliantly.