Rebecca Week 6 - Math in my Family

Last week, I wrote about my obsession with BurgerFi; this week, I think it’s time I cover my fixation with math. Since fourth grade, I have been heavily interested in math in any form, but it didn’t start out this way. I would doodle in my workbook and ignore Ms. Sefton’s presentations. One day, they pulled a few of us out of class and made an “advanced” class for some of the students. Math became more interesting when it started being a challenge.

As I wrote this, I remembered that in Pre-K or kindergarten, the teachers asked if anyone knew how to add, and I eagerly responded. I explained that you would put the numbers together; when further prompted, I said something like, “and that would mean 1 + 1 is 11.”
More recently, I learned that I am not the first person in my family to like numbers; my dad has told me stories about his grandparents, claiming he was just like them each time he did well on a math exam. Then I discovered that my grandpa was a calculus professor!? He earned the nickname “Puente Roto” or “Broken Bridge” because no one could pass his class.

Just the other week, we were having Shabbat dinner, and my grandpa quizzed me on integrals by writing an equation on a napkin. In all honesty, I had to quickly check my notes, but I figured it out and proved my mom wrong.
It’s interesting to try to do math in another language. You wouldn’t expect it to be too hard, yet after trying this one problem, we realized that even saying numbers in your non-native language is very tricky. Apparently, math is a weird familial trait I have; do you have anything similar to this in your family?

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