I learned to read before I started kindergarten and I was in gifted programs of some type starting as early as first or second grade. In eighth grade, I took Algebra.
That was advanced placement because it was typically offered starting in ninth grade. I probably took Geometry in ninth grade, Algebra II in tenth grade and Advanced Algebra - Trigonometry in eleventh grade.
In eleventh grade at age sixteen, I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta. Those are the Greek letters for M A TH.
Mu Alpha Theta is a college level math honor society. You must be in college level math and maintain certain grades. I don't remember anymore if it's for just the math class or overall or both. Eleventh grade was the earliest you could be inducted at that time.
Our chapter of Mu Alpha Theta at my high school tutored once a week I think. For an hour after school, anyone in our high school could drop by and get free help from one of the local math geeks.
One girl was probably officially low IQ. No one else would work with her.
Her report card was full of Cs and Ds and she worked harder for her Cs and Ds than I ever worked for my As and Bs. She somehow had gotten herself into algebra. I have no idea how.
She was there every week like clockwork. First in, last out and the other geeks wanted nothing to do with her.
Her algebra teacher was NEW at our school. It was her first year teaching. And she couldn't teach her way out of a wet paper bag.
I know that because she did her student teaching stint the year before in MY Algebra II class. On more than one occasion, after someone asked a question and she filled the entire chalkboard with COMPLETELY irrelevant nonsense and most of the class was staring at it in horror, not knowing how to react, I went upfront and wrote a brief explanation and watched the whole class heave a sigh of relief as the lights went on.
She hated me. I hated her incompetent ass back. And this chick in her class who can't just figure it out from reading the textbook is there every minute available for tutoring and no one will explain it to her but ME.
So working with her was most of my tutoring experience. While other tutors explained something to five or ten people, I explained something five or ten different ways to her until she got it.
Years later, that paid dividends when I homeschooled my Twice Exceptional sons, one of whom is terrible with numbers and had enormous difficulty learning math.
I have a serious medical condition that wasn't diagnosed until age thirty-five. My senior year in high school, I and only two other people were invited to a zero hour advanced math class that was scheduled before homeroom.
They accepted their invitations. I turned mine down because I was already struggling to get through the day.
My first quarter of college, I enrolled in Calculus and was falling on my face. I was rusty and actual college classes move a LOT faster than high school classes.
A year of X in high school is typically a single class of college and in college it's taught in four-and-a-half to six months, not nine. Four-anf-a-half months for the quarter system and six months for the semester system and I was in a quarter system.
My older sister told me it's okay to drop the class, God bless her. And I did.
So I spent four years taking advanced math to "prepare for college" only to feel shafted by the system because I already had more college math than most people with a Bachelor of Arts and I'm being told I need to take two more college math classes to get a degree and, no, I can't like repeat algebra. It needs to be NEW material.
Fuck me in particular.
I was bitter about that for more than a decade. I didn't enroll in another college math class until more than ten years later.
After dropping out of college after two years with no degree to show for it, I took a few classes at a community college and tested out of a few things to wrap up an Associate's of Arts.
So more than a decade later, I got a CLEP study guide or whatever and bought a computer program to practice. I mostly knew the rules but had forgotten a lot of the little squiggles, AKA math notatation.
The computer program had errors. I was homeschooling and told my kids they probably shouldn't use it because they don't know enough math to catch the errors.
I wrapped up my AA in May or June so I wouldn't have to start over from scratch if I ever wanted to pursue a bachelor's degree, SOMEDAY. Kizmet struck and I was enrolled in an online BS program that fall.
Probably my very first quarter, I took the statistics class required for my degree program. I spoke with the professor by phone and he determined I was qualified, then he was told change in school policy, you can't waiver her in. But we learned my CLEP score for algebra was high enough to let me take it.
I was also enrolled in Environmental Law I that same quarter. After the midterm, I began blowing off my statistics class and just kind of phoning it in to conserve my limited study time for my law class.
I probably had the only "natural A" in Statistics. They curved the grade and my score was posted as 107.
I got an A minus in Law. Called my sister and cried on her shoulder.
I also taught statistics as part of homeschooling my kids. I offered my math-challenged son a choice between the usual Algebra-Geometry-Trig track and Statistics and didn't mention statistics is deemed to be harder.
He chose statistics. We also did some calculus stuff because he's a science geek and into physics and calculus is the math of physics.
I was trying to convince him "Math is fun! Math is your friend!" And get him over his public school induced math phobia.
Calculus is the only math that gives me a headache. I played that for all it was worth.
I did get him over his phobia. He's still not good with numbers, which gets called calculator dependent in some circles, but he read calculus books independently for fun after he was an adult and asked me questions I couldn't answer, so I asked on Metafilter.
On TAGMAX, a gifted homeschooling list, someone once said my first website -- a parenting and homeschooling site -- was "All math, all the time." Some of those old posts have been recently reposted to my current parenting site, probably typically tagged MATH.