A 19-year-old woman I’ll call Alice had always hated school but wanted to pass the GED. She did not know the difference between addition and multiplication, a concept taught very early in grade school. Since the GED covers grade school and high school, I was worried that it might take Alice several years to pass the math part.

How wrong I was.

I started to explain the difference between multiplication and addition to her. After a few false starts, I used little boxes lined up in a row to represent addition and arranged in rectangles to represent multiplication.

Suddenly, she understood it.

It is as if Alice had gone on a school field trip, got off at a rest stop, and missed the bus when it left. Nothing made sense after that. She could not catch up on her own. There are a lot of students like that. But now she was back on the bus.

Once she understood that basic concept, Alice became excited about math. She found she enjoyed it. She was taking a GED class, and one day the teacher asked her a math question she could answer. She kept on talking about math she had learned and taught it to the other students until the class was over.

She passed the math section within six months.

This taught me never to underestimate my students. Like most people who “can’t do math,” Alice was perfectly capable. She just needed it presented in the right way.

Another case was a friend of mine I’ll call Sara. She had gotten C’s in high school math and hadn’t been to school in at least ten years. But now she wanted a real estate license, and that meant passing a test that included financial math and geometry. So I spent an evening showing her how to read a word problem, lay the problem out on paper, and solve it.

The next morning, she called me and said, “I stayed up all night solving problems. I was so excited! I never could before.”

What people hate is that they can’t do math. But anyone with average intelligence can learn to do it and enjoy it.