# math teacher needed to teach basic math to Harvard graduate who wants to go to business school **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [May 14, 2011, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943 "2011-05-14T23:17:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![code\_grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f4b2a3/32.png) [@code\_grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/code_grey)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2011, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/1 "2011-05-14T23:17:05Z")
from craigslist: > [@](#): > > this is not your usual posting for a math tutor, although a math tutor is what is needed. the student you would be working with is nearly 40 years old, and although she has always done well in school and went on to Harvard for college, math was always her weakest subject. in a recent conversation, she described what can only be described as an acute math anxiety: she explained that whenever anything with numbers of any kind comes up, her pulse starts to quicken, her eyes glaze over and her ears just stop processing what the person is saying, unless she really focuses hard on it. it almost sounds like she’s describing a panic attack when you hear her explain it. > > it was her high school physics instructor who first realized that she had huge, gaping holes in her math knowledge. he noticed that it was always an easy computation error that would cause her to get problem sets wrong on assignments and tests, but the thread of her logic was sound and seemed to suggest that she had some understanding of the higher principles involved. so he started examining all of her tests/assignments to look for common threads, and found that it was the early math concepts that you learn in elementary/middle school that she never actually learned thoroughly, but **somehow she’d still managed to figure out enough on her own to get herself into algebra, chemistry, calculus and physics in high school - and pass all of them with at least a B** , sometimes higher. unfortunately for her, this discovery didn’t occur until her senior year in high school, so there was no way for it to get corrected prior to her departure for college. she moved around a lot with her family when she was young, so no doubt this is when she failed to get the solid math skills that she needed. > > she is now ready to address this math anxiety head on, in part because she thinks it’s ridiculous to be afraid of a bunch of numbers, but also because i think she’s ready to go back to school and make a career change. she’s a competitive person, and wouldn’t want to go into any situation feeling deficient right out the gate. the complication here is that we think she may have suffered a mini stroke in the not too distant past, which seems to have impacted her memory and math ability. so, we need an exceptional math teacher who has worked with people whose math skills may have been impaired due to some kind of trauma to the brain, like a car accident, stroke, etc. > > preferably, we’d like someone who can **take her from elementary math through college math** , but it’s ok if you aren’t a specialist in both elementary math and college math. we recognize that the same person may not be able to do all grade levels equally well, so we might have to get more than one person as she progresses through each level of math. > > if you are interested in this ongoing project, which we anticipate will take several years, as she is interested in going all the way through college level mathematics with an eye toward grad school or business school and the requisite exams required for each Bolding mine. Turns out there is an American high school out there where you can get a B in calculus and chemistry while not understanding basic math, and then there is the Harvard College that will admit you despite presumably completely flunked SAT math. At least, presumably, if you happen to have some other non mentioned qualities of the wonderful person described above. Now all we need is to get her memorize the rules for solving some algebra problems so she can pass GMAT and graduate from business school. After all, as we all know, the perennial talent shortage makes American businesses and government agencies yearningly thirst for this sort of high powered professionals. Then get her do a stint in an NGO or Peace Corps and there we have it - a talented, experienced, proven candidate for employment in the government that is busy bringing us all the change we can believe in. ---
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2011, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/2 "2011-05-14T23:34:14Z")
Doesn’t surprise me at all. The state of math education in America is a sad, sad, affair. ---
**Author:** ![code\_grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f4b2a3/32.png) [@code\_grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/code_grey)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2011, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/3 "2011-05-14T23:51:44Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > Doesn’t surprise me at all. The state of math education in America is a sad, sad, affair. well, the state of math education in my American high school was pretty good - at least for smart people who cared about math. And whereas this high school may have contained people who did not know middle school math, such people were not allowed to enter the calculus class, let alone graduate with a B. Whether any of them ended up graduating from Harvard College and planning to go to business school in order to more fully use their multiple intelligences, EQ and “the whole person” when viewed “holistically” in the noble mission to make the world a better place is beyond my knowledge 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2011, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/4 "2011-05-14T23:57:04Z")
> [@code\_grey](#): > > well, the state of math education in my American high school was pretty good - **at least for smart people who cared about math**. (My emphasis) And what percentage of the population is that, do ya think? ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/5 "2011-05-15T00:00:14Z")
She “figured out enough on her own”? Hmmm… sounds like a load of crap to me. The truth would be that enough of what people tried to teach her sank in so she could scrape by. Which is a very common experience for a large part of the student population. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/6 "2011-05-15T00:20:40Z")
You’re assuming that everything said in the Craigslist posting is correct. I think that it’s probably not accurate. My experience is that it’s pretty common for people to claim that they are no good at math, when the fact is that they are reasonably good at it. They just don’t understand why, when they are the top of their class in all their other subjects, they aren’t as good in math. It’s hard to tell how much of the claims in the Craigslist posting are right. It’s possible, for instance, that while this woman does well enough at high-school-level math when she works slowly and carefully at the problems, she sometimes finds that in tests she is pressed for time, so she tries to work too fast. When she does this, she makes small arithmetic mistakes that mess her up, despite her understanding of the high-school-level material. It’s quite possible that her high school work on other subjects was so good that she could get into a good college despite mediocre math grades. Furthermore, the Craigslist posting says that she may have suffered a mini-stroke. If that’s really true, this means that whoever wrote this might not even actually know what the high school experience of this woman was like. Perhaps she doesn’t even remember herself, and she is making up a backstory to explain why she has problems now. People sometimes do that. Being unable to explain why something is now true (because of their loss of memory), they make up a story (and they don’t even realize that they are making up a story) to explain the problems in their life. ---
**Author:** ![code\_grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f4b2a3/32.png) [@code\_grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/code_grey)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/7 "2011-05-15T00:24:04Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > (My emphasis) > > And what percentage of the population is that, do ya think? I have no reason to believe that let’s say in Russia at the hey day of the Soviet educational system (long since broken down) the majority of people cared about math and were actually able to handle the official curriculum. In the absence of standardized testing the system for making future blue collar workers pass the “state exams” and graduate was widely rumored to be corrupt - corrupt not due to bribes but due to the administrators’ understanding of the disconnect between the curriculum and the actual abilities and life tracks of their students. The system was honest enough to make everybody but the truly retarded learn arithmetic and basic algebra, but they certainly ended up with less algebra, geometry, chemistry etc than what the official curriculum promised. The key difference between that and what we are talking here was this - these people did not go on to graduate from places like Harvard College. Not even to the Soviet equivalent of “business school” which would be kind of like the management and accounting undergrad major in an American state school, i.e. a place way less selective than Harvard. They pursued blue collar careers that were appropriate to their level of intelligence. ---
**Author:** ![code\_grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f4b2a3/32.png) [@code\_grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/code_grey)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/8 "2011-05-15T00:36:27Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > You’re assuming that everything said in the Craigslist posting is correct. I think that it’s probably not accurate. My experience is that it’s pretty common for people to claim that they are no good at math, when the fact is that they are reasonably good at it. They just don’t understand why, when they are the top of their class in all their other subjects, they aren’t as good in math. It’s hard to tell how much of the claims in the Craigslist posting are right. It’s possible, for instance, that while this woman does well enough at high-school-level math when she works slowly and carefully at the problems, she sometimes finds that in tests she is pressed for time, so she tries to work too fast. When she does this, she makes small arithmetic mistakes that mess her up, despite her understanding of the high-school-level material. It’s quite possible that her high school work on other subjects was so good that she could get into a good college despite mediocre math grades. > > Furthermore, the Craigslist posting says that she may have suffered a mini-stroke. If that’s really true, this means that whoever wrote this might not even actually know what the high school experience of this woman was like. Perhaps she doesn’t even remember herself, and she is making up a backstory to explain why she has problems now. People sometimes do that. Being unable to explain why something is now true (because of their loss of memory), they make up a story (and they don’t even realize that they are making up a story) to explain the problems in their life. or maybe things are worse than what is claimed here. Maybe she never understood squat of the “calculus” and “chemistry” classes she took in high school. And maybe neither did many of her teachers. Maybe Harvard College looked at her totally flunked scores on SAT Math and SAT 2 Math (I think SAT 2 math is required there) and said, yeah, just look at all those B’s she got in math, chemistry and physics. Waah, we want her. But that is not my main gist here. What I am getting at is, the lady started out dumb and got even dumber after the stroke. So now, she is trying to go to business school! Will she take a big student loan when she is there? What kind of responsible job will she end up getting upon graduation on the strength of a stack of credentials one more fake and lying than the other? Will she end up in an NY Times article called “the case of Ms. X is an inspiration to all retarded, innumerate, literally brain-damaged graduates of nonfunctioning high schools who have been making great gains lately despite status quo enforcing resistance from the obdurate mouth breathers”? ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/9 "2011-05-15T00:38:41Z")
“I got six percent in math. Is that good or bad?” ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/10 "2011-05-15T00:42:23Z")
You’re trying to construct a huge theory of how American education works on the basis of one Craigslist posting, which may well not be accurate. If you want to construct such a theory, find some reliable statistics. This Craigslist posting isn’t even an anecdote, let alone a reliable statistic. It’s no more to be trusted than a story you heard while on a bus from someone who sat in the seat ahead of you who insisted in telling the person next to them about the problems in their life. ---
**Author:** ![code\_grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f4b2a3/32.png) [@code\_grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/code_grey)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/11 "2011-05-15T00:53:08Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > This Craigslist posting isn’t even an anecdote, let alone a reliable statistic. It’s no more to be trusted than a story you heard while on a bus from someone who sat in the seat ahead of you who insisted in telling the person next to them about the problems in their life. :smack: you are way off, man! This posting is **Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share** 🆒 ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/12 "2011-05-15T00:59:08Z")
So you’re saying that you don’t have to make any rational arguments in this forum. You can just tell third-hand stories and pretend that they have any truth or relevance in them. This way you don’t actually have to think through anything you believe, since you don’t actually care about logical reasoning. ---
**Author:** ![code\_grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f4b2a3/32.png) [@code\_grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/code_grey)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 1:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/13 "2011-05-15T01:06:30Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > So you’re saying that you don’t have to make any rational arguments in this forum. You can just tell third-hand stories and pretend that they have any truth or relevance in them. This way you don’t actually have to think through anything you believe, since you don’t actually care about logical reasoning. **now** who is over-generalizing? What makes you think that your hypothesis about the matter is more valid than mine? We have no evidence for either one, and I personally don’t feel like going undercover and doing research. So I would say that both hypotheses fit the MPSIMS mold very well. Besides, what’s wrong with bitching about dubious anecdata when you don’t feel like working? That is, if you don’t have a cushy job in NY Times or a similar outfit which would actually pay you for doing basically same thing, except from a different political slant? ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/14 "2011-05-15T03:16:32Z")
I simply don’t believe that such a person could ever have been admitted to Harvard in the first place. ---
**Author:** ![raspberry\_hunter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b19c9b/32.png) [@raspberry\_hunter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/raspberry_hunter)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/15 "2011-05-15T03:48:53Z")
I agree that this is a pretty low gradepoint average for getting into Harvard, and honestly the most likely scenario is that someone is exaggerating a little to make the woman look smarter. However, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Perhaps she published a book, or was an Olympic star, or won national competitions in non-mathematical areas, or started her own business (though I suppose someone else would have had to do the accounting). I’ve known people like that, who may not have had the best grades but showed exceptional skill and initiative and were admitted to Harvard anyway. (I don’t think I know anyone admitted to Harvard – and I’m a little younger than the woman in the OP, but not by much – who didn’t have something exceptional and didn’t have good grades across the board.) The fact that she moved around a lot when she was young may mean she was able to do something really interesting (who knows, maybe she was able to start a nonprofit to help typhoid sufferers or something). But anyway, why would someone put that in a Craigslist posting? > [@code\_grey](#): > > Turns out there is an American high school out there where you can get a B in calculus and chemistry while not understanding basic math Certainly at the first high school I went to there were plenty of kids making A-'s and B’s without understanding what the heck they were doing. I know because I tutored some of them. (Second was a magnet, so doesn’t count.) > [@](#): > > preferably, we’d like someone who can take her from elementary math through college math Don’t know why you think that’s weird, though. If there’s something you haven’t done at all for _twenty years_, and weren’t very good at to begin with, don’t you think you’d want to start at the beginning too? Heck, my liberal arts friends panicked when they had to take the math GRE sections, and that was only 3 years not doing math. At least she knows it’s a long-term project, and kudos to her for that. And hey, if she comes out of it with a solid math background, that’s more than a lot of 40-year-olds. I actually think I’d rather have her in business school than someone who wasn’t facing up to the fact that her math skills sucked. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 4:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/16 "2011-05-15T04:37:14Z")
Just a little curious here **code\_grey** , how well did you do at Harvard? ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/17 "2011-05-15T04:42:12Z")
> [@code\_grey](#): > > What makes you think that your hypothesis about the matter is more valid than mine? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. That’s the entire point. If multiple, contradictory conclusions can be drawn from the same data, with no way to differentiate between the likelihood of any of them, then it’s an error to rely on any of those conclusions as accurate. This is basic critical thinking stuff, here. That you have (apparently) graduated from high school without picking any of that up is at least as worrisome as the conclusions you’ve drawn in your OP. ---
**Author:** ![code\_grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f4b2a3/32.png) [@code\_grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/code_grey)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/18 "2011-05-15T05:08:16Z")
apropos of nothing, here is a segment from [Mayakovsky’s](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Mayakovsky) satirical poem about the quality of certain early Soviet “poets” who got published for reasons other than the quality of their work. My shoddy translation cannot give justice to the brilliant original (which does of course rhyme and has a real rhythm). Russian original is here [ФЭБ: Маяковский. Марксизм — оружие, огнестрельный метод. Применяй умеючи метод этот! — 1957 (текст)](http://feb-web.ru/feb/mayakovsky/texts/ms0/ms7/ms7-106-.htm) > [@](#): > > … > For Stepa an ignorance > – of the periods and commas > Is redeemed by the masses’ > – instinctual consciousness. > since his momma has labored > – as a hired field hand > while his daddy a worker > – and peasant simultaneously. > > From all that, a matter > – more plain than tomato > Gets concealed quite fully > – inside foggy grey. > And then these unartful > – piled breaths so wasted > Some prefer to describe > – as the teaching of Marx. > … coming back to OP, yeah, so I am not all that surprised that somebody with a low gpa and lack of ability to pass the SAT gets into Harvard. ---
**Author:** ![nani](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/58956e/32.png) [@nani](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nani)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 8:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/19 "2011-05-15T08:51:58Z")
“Went on to Harvard for college” is actually kind of vague. It’s possible that she took a course or some kind of certification at Harvard Extension school, or she attended some classes at Harvard as part of some exchange agreement with other Boston area schools. Even if this story is accurate as to her incompetence (which reflects something about her high school that does not reflect my own American high school) and she did graduate from Harvard in something, it’s possible that it might have been a specialized program in something completely non-math related. Her other qualities might indeed make up for it. I got a very nice math score on my GRE (my time as an engineer came in handy) but I doubt it did much to get me into Harvard Divinity School. ---
**Author:** ![Markxxx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5daacb/32.png) [@Markxxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Markxxx)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2011, 12:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943/20 "2011-05-15T12:42:07Z")
Math is a bit problematic as it builds on itself. If you get anything less than an “A” in a math class your are not going to the excellent understanding of the subject. OK fine, but the NEXT math class you take will assume you FULLY understand the previous classes. This is because math builds on itself. As you advance, you always use the information from prior classes. If you lack in one part of math, you’re gonna suffer for it through the rest of your classes. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/math-teacher-needed-to-teach-basic-math-to-harvard-graduate-who-wants-to-go-to-business-school/581943.md?page=2)