These days, when I need to employ some math to figure out a household problem, such as how many pesos to take to Cancun or what is more economical, using Keurig pods or canned coffee, I rely on Google.

That’s because much like my handwriting, my math skills have atrophied over the years.

But, was I ever good at math? That I really can’t tell you.

During my childhood, I used to help my mother double and triple her recipes for our hungry family. A precocious learner with a terrific memory, my mom had skipped two grades at her convent school, she said, so she missed out on a key component of her math education, fractions. Her cakes always turned turned out scrumptious proving, I think, my early math ability.

My own math implosion happened in the 10^th grade. I was in advanced math in grade 10 with all of my friends from the ‘enriched’ stream and I did so poorly on the final exam I plummeted the next year into remedial math, totally skipping general math. My parents’ divorce that year likely had something to do with it.

Still, a friend of mine who went on to major in genetics in university, claimed she too ‘hit the wall’ in the 10^th grade. Her father, an engineer, helped her through it, she said.

Ironically, my father, a chartered accountant, majored in math at Oxford around WWII. While I was still in the single digits age-wise, he often gave me math puzzles in the hope I would prove to be some kind of math genius: If a bath fills at this rate and empties at that rate how much water is left after 10 minutes? I’m not joking. My father, apparently, had never heard of scaffolding.

My 10^th grade math teacher, judging from Facebook posts upon his death, was a terrific teacher. He just didn’t put much store in my abilities. Maybe he was put off by my loudmouth ‘women’s lib’ lecturing. Let’s face it, in those days, they expected girls to fumble in math at around 16 years of age. Hormones and all.

I recall how achingly awful it was to be in this 11th grade remedial math class not only because I didn’t know anybody but because the teacher treated the students as if they were so stupid -and I wasn’t used to that. I remember the man entering the classroom room once with a styrofoam coffee cup over his face, snorting like a pig.

I don’t recall my final matriculation mark in math. I do recall the SATS, those aptitude tests you took at the end of school. I remember approaching the desk set up outside the gym oh-so- timidly to learn my score. The desk attendant handed it to me on a little piece of paper: a 92 percentile for language and 75 percentile for math.

The girl beside me with much lower numbers announced that ‘lower is better” and with such confidence I half-believed her. Then Jay, one of the smartest and coolest kids in our grade sauntered up to the desk, his glistening head of golden hair catching the morning light. The desk attendant handed him his score. The boy gave a hint of a shrug then (rather snootily) waved the paper in my face. 99th and 99th percentile. But of course.

So on these Scholastic Aptitude Tests I got the same math score as my friend Wayne, a funny hard working boy with a penchant for public speaking who was in advanced math. He once told a teacher who was polling another class that he did two full hours of homework a night when the rest of us admitted with misguided pride to doing around ten minutes or even five minutes or even none at all. This boy went on to become a much celebrated scientist and he now gives talks around the world. Surprise!

I got a much better math score than my gal-pal, Tessa, from an artsy family, who told me she could read by age three which may have been ‘a creative exaggeration’ (she was prone to them) and who already had a short story published in an American teen magazine. (This I can verify.)Tessa often showed me the portfolio of photographs and poems she had ready to submit to a prestigious college film program. On the SATS, Tessa got a high high 90’s score for language and a low low 20 percentile score for the math. And she had been in the general math class!

My 75^th percentile high school score in mathematics isn’t Bill Gates territory, but it’s OK. I do recall that I loved solving long division in elementary school and quadratic equations in grade 9, before the divorce.

Anyway, it evened out because being in the enriched English stream I could spit on a page and get an A. That being said, Mrs. B. my 11^th grade teacher, did not appreciate me choosing “the rock star” Bob Dylan as a poet for an end-of-term project so she gave me an A-.

I had been inspired by my 10^th grade teacher who let us kids listen to Jesus Christ Superstar in class instead of deconstructing some dull Dickens novel. For this 11th grade Dylan project, I listened to my older brother’s Best Of Bob long play album over and over to transcribe the lyrics, my index finger recklessly jiggering the stylus on the turntable of his beloved brand new stereo system. I didn’t get all of the words. For My Back Pages, I transcribed “half racked refrigerators” instead of “half wracked prejudice.” Maybe that was why I lost the marks. Doubt it, though.

Still, in hindsight, who was right about Bob Dylan, my teacher Mrs. B or me? Nobel Prize, eh? Today, I regularly listen to both Bob Dylan and Murray Head on Spotify, my musical sensibilities firmly entrenched in that time period.

Back then, in the early 1970’s Jay, the cool and the clever, wasn’t afraid of ever getting less than an A in any subject. I recall him blithely waltzing into grade eleven English class on the very last day, his arms piled high with long overdue essays that, apparently, he had tossed off the night before. And then, performing for the class, he casually let go of them one-by-one onto the teacher’s desk. What style he had! What panache! I should have married him.