A Genuine Math Fizzle

I once took a competency exam in math as a requirement to enter a leading U.S. teacher’s school and scored 100%.

Keep that in mind, it will be important later.

Last week I was approached by a staffer at the Michigan Library Association, our state’s professional organization, who was fishing for “strong public speakers who are not faint of heart.” She wanted to know if I’d be willing to do a “fizzle” session at the upcoming annual conference. Fizzle is a fast-paced presentation style made up of 20 PowerPoint slides that auto-forward every 15 seconds while you talk about a personal or professional failure and what you did about it.

I’m going to talk about how I asked for the job of keeping statistics for our flagship program to impress my boss when I can’t, in fact, do even basic math, can’t work Excel and hate numbers.

Let’s back up.

At one point some years after I finished my Bachelor’s I thought I wanted to be a teacher. I brushed up on my math via some books and took the test. Then I realized I didn’t actually want to be a teacher. But I could multiply fractions for a few months. They certainly couldn’t have asked us to do anything more advanced because I wouldn’t have been able to. It was during this period that I took the competency exam and scored 100%.

I’ve never been particularly good at math. In elementary school I scraped through. I was “smart” and I was in a Southern school where class and race mattered and I “scored” in those two areas so my lack of math skills was not challenged. Then we moved north and I hit a brick wall in junior high. They expected actual computation.

8th grade was geometry. I had a furious crush on my teacher but however much I wanted to please him, it didn’t help. I flunked geometry. I repeated the entire year.

I went to an “alternative” high school. A cool, flashy alternative high school that attracted an elite student body. We had the highest percentage of kids go on to ivy league schools and the highest percentage of kids go on to college of any kind in Ann Arbor. But we were “alternative.” And we were small (student body of 314) and we got a lot of individual attention. We were nurtured to do what we did best. I completed the state’s minimum math requirement and 7 1/2 years of English. It was my choice and the problems that have resulted are my own. I do not blame anybody else.

I had no math in college. We had to take a competency exam coming in and I passed by one question. One. Or I would have had to take remedial math. But I didn’t. And it wasn’t required for English majors. So, no math for me.

On the Graduate Record Exam (the exam that college graduates take to progress into a Master’s degree program) I scored in the 30th percentile in math. Considering I hadn’t had math in about 6 years and I was competing with undergraduates of all ilks I thought that was pretty good. I was in the 83th or so in English so I walked away feeling just fine.

I’ve never been proud of my lack of math skills. But really? I also haven’t cared. There are things one is good at, and things one is not. I chalked math into the latter category and avoided it. Then, when I needed basic math at work I found that I no longer possessed even the ability figure a percentage.

The first question I had to face that day I took over stats was “What percentage of 30 is 6?”

Not only could I not do this off the top of my head but I did not know the computation to figure it out. I Googled “What percentage of 30 is 6?” and they presented me with a calculator. I already knew that wasn’t going to help me!

I initially spent some quality time working hard to protect my new-boss of 14 months from this knowledge about myself. But now I’m doing the Fizzle presentation and it’s all coming out in the wash.

I took on stats because I wanted to tell a story. The person doing them before me was retiring and she was happy to post an Excel sheet once a year and call it good. I was appalled. I wanted a clean, crisp narrative in Verdana with a Table of Contents auto-generated by Microsoft Word. I also wanted to compare our progress, or lack thereof, across fiscal quarters and years. I wanted to tell the story of the project and I believed the stats could do that. Other members of the team don’t “believe” in stats regardless of format and so they pretty much just ignore the whole thing. I was determined to get meaning out of the numbers.

My co-workers helped me out immensely. I work with several data analysts and other folks who are simply good at math and Excel and who can help me with a formula in a pinch. I passed off the data entry to our student worker. Anyone not intimidated by numbers can do a fair job of that portion. I’m “blinded” by spreadsheets and lose my common sense so even copying and pasting numbers from one Excel workbook to another is challenging for me, not to mention that it drives me to drink. 

I will admit that there is meaning that I initially tried to get out of the stats that I was never able to figure out how to get. I simply can’t write the formulas. I don’t know the math to make it happen. And there’s only so much help one can ask for quarter after quarter. So my reports don’t contain that data. To be strictly fair, the reports written before me didn’t have it either so no one besides me notices (except, perhaps, my new-boss).

I figured out early on that I wasn’t doing a good job with the stats. I was so overwhelmed by the hundreds and hundreds of numbers that I was expected to “analyze” (cough) each month that I instantly came to hate them. Before long my strong desire to impress my then-boss was over-ridden by my even stronger desire to get this job the hell off my plate. Unfortunately, the window where that job was being reassigned had passed and over the next two years she never saw fit to reassign it although I asked several times. My now-boss also knows that I don’t want this responsibility and when I make this presentation she’s also going to know that I can’t get a percentage out of 30 so perhaps she’ll speed up the process of getting it moved.

Some of the numbers I reported on were so tedious that I had no idea what they meant. Under supervision (and with a change in two levels of management and hence years worth of built-up druthers), we dropped most of those from the regular quarterly reports. 

Some numbers are alarming, including a steady 50% decline in usage of certain staple resources over the past five years. Under the now-boss, I will note for the record, we are paying hundreds of thousands less each year for the resources that aren’t performing the way they were five years ago. She paid plenty of attention to the stats when it came time to whip the checkbook out during recent contract negotiations.

The best part about my work on stats is not the clean, crisp Verdana report with the auto-generated Table of Contents (because believe me, we do have that now), it’s the bullet pointed email that I send out to teammates to accompany the announcement each quarter that the stats have been posted. That’s where the real dirt is. And a real data analyst would have a lot more dirt, but that’s where I have my say. That’s where I talk about what I’ve seen the numbers saying, which is what I wanted to be doing all along. If you read my pretty report you’ll see the usage dropping, if you get my emails I’ll tell you in 10 words or less in a way that you can’t miss it. I guess that’s my favorite part now. It’s a real shame it took me two and a half years to figure out that I could do that.

In any case, come October I’ll have 5 self-deprecating minutes to half-joke about why someone with sub-standard math skills took on a stats project and how we’ve had to work around that as a team. I’ll also talk about what my vision was that isn’t getting fulfilled and how the minimum standards according to now-boss are being fulfilled. And how we’re hoping to find a new person to take on this role. Someone for whom Excel is “fun” and Sodoku is something to do on the train. I’ll also talk about how this staffing snafu lead to less-than-optimal results for the project as a whole.

Because really? Me wanting to impress a boss and tell a story was a lousy reason to ask for this assignment and keeping the responsibility with me for three years hasn’t done any favors for the project. 

The fact of the matter is that my failure story doesn’t have a happy, inspiring ending. I didn’t become an Excel aficionado with time. I wasn’t inspired to learn statistics or brush up on even basic high school math. I still hate the task. To cope I simply outsourced the portion of the job I could, simplified the end product and maximized what I could do well (write a narrative every quarter). What we have now is undoubtedly better than a posted Excel sheet but I think the next person to have this job will be able to do a lot more with it.