Finding himself in an environment outside of Ireland, the mathematician often knows how to make his worth felt.

Miss Hoover, my pencil went up my nose, can I have another one?

Just go to sleep and become one with the vikings.

The way that I was taught multiplication and division was pretty fucking backasswards as it was: in our case it was through time trials. So we'd just memorize them and get our names up on the board. Fuckin' A! I'm in the 60 second club! Screw you, people actually doing the math!!! During this time I learned nothing about multiplication and actually had to take a remedial math class in college despite the fact that I took calculus in high school!!!

I was in the gifted program in grade school (which is strongly correlated with how screwed-up I am), and in 5th grade we had a traveling teacher who would do special math classes for those of us who showed an affinity for math. The math teacher pushed us pretty hard on learning new things, but those of us in that section loved it and we always wanted more and more. We were learning pretty advanced algebra and even the rudiments of calculus.

Unfortunately, our regular teacher felt threatened by him for some reason, so she decided to prove that he was doing harm by drilling all of the students on flash-memorization of two-digit multiplication tables. Then she had us in the advanced math class compete on a timed test against everyone who had been drilling.

So of course, none of us in the advanced section did very well based on the arbitrary standard of filling out the test very quickly (even though we were 100% accurate), but she used this as proof that we weren't learning "real math" and that the math unit should be discontinued.

Which it was, briefly, until a bunch of FUCKING TEN YEAR OLDS pointed out to the adults how stupid this decision was, and the advanced math class was reinstated.

Yeah I was in this thing called TAG.. I dunno if it's regional or national but it's incredibly fucked up when you think about it as an adult: it was incredibly polarizing.

from outer space to myspace in just a generation.

Looks like TAG is just a common term for "talented and gifted" and is just done by local school districts rather than being a national program or whatever.

In Albuquerque in the 80s, both gifted and developmentally-disabled students were shuffled into the "Special Education" program, which was all handled under a single funding umbrella and often singular oversight, which led to all sorts of fun stuff like gifted kids riding on the short bus with violent retarded kids (and to make things more fun the short bus had seat belts with incredibly dangerous buckles, and yes there were injuries constantly on board), and all of us being treated under the "sped" banner.

To make things even more fun (for the retarded kids' self-esteem) there were three different gifted tracks, A B and C (in increasing levels, C being the full-time gifted program that I was in) and then the developmentally-disabled kids were classified under "D." So C kids were perceived as being just one step away from retarded.

The teachers were mostly terrible, too, and the ones who were any good got burned out very quickly by a terrible system.

I had a hard time watching Malcolm in the Middle because SO MUCH of it reminded me of my grade school education, both with the Krelboynes AND the Buseys.

The mathematical reasoning would be too complex for your earth brain.