Jane stares at the jumble of x’s and y’s and numbers and parentheses. There was something. ..Excuse My Sister Sally…she tries to recall it but it slips away, like the tail of a fish under water.
She’d breezed through the English placement, no problem. But how many years since her high school algebra? College entrance exams, at her age!
Really–you’d think if she stared hard enough at this typographic soup, it would be intimidated enough to rearrange itself into something that made sense.
Every week, Ivy at Uncharted hosts the Six Sentence Stories flash fiction linkup. This week’s cue was “entrance.” Fun Sixes from other writers are here.
99 Monkeys 
I remember high school Algebra–weeping, until I finally got a tutor and aced a test!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I enjoyed high school algebra because I had an amazing teacher. Geometry, not so much.
LikeLike
It’s a blur, but I think I was equally poor at Geometry–and no tutor to rescue me.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I doubt if I would have any idea of how to solve an algebraic equation at this stage in my life. Typographic soup, indeed.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This flash if BOTS, and it came right back once I got through the remedial class. LOL
LikeLike
I’m grateful that I never had to take an algebra…..and I haven’t missed it! Just business math suited me just fine!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I had to take some calculus too, and a lot of it was business-oriented, like amortization. I was like, “Don’t they have an app for that?” lol
LikeLike
I remember that although it was a challenge for me, I enjoyed algebra. When I had to take exams for my teaching certificate as an adult many years later? Much more difficult to pull those concepts from the back of my brain.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I liked it too, once I got back into it. Like solving puzzles.
LikeLike
I really wanted to understand algebra in high school, but I did not, tried to hard to wrestle it to the ground. It was only years later, way, way too late, that I realized the best approach (for me) would have been to consider it a foreign language. That way I would focus on acquiring the vocabulary and then the syntax, rather than what I did, which was to believe it was something I should understand.
nicely…. musical Six (no, really the rhythm of this one made me immediately think of a song)
LikeLiked by 1 person
It is a language. Once I approached it that way, it got a lot easier. A musical Six! Thank you!
LikeLike
Algebra was the one high school course that made absolutely no sense to me, and I have never found a need to use it since! I can sympathize with attempting to complete math entrance exams, and you portrayed that feeling of dismay well here!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you!
LikeLike