Large, round eyes blankly flitter around the room then squint as a grin spreads across her face. “I don’t know,” she says to the panel of teachers at the Math Bowl in 1989. The young lady made the math team by the skin of her teeth but proved unable to function at all under real pressure. This hot math mess was me in high school. After a couple of mental blocks during math competitions, I wrote myself off as unable to work with numbers. I chose a major with one math class and graduated confident that pesky math courses were a thing of the past. It’s really ironic how life turns out. Now, at the age of 48, I have completed K-8 math four times along with multiple semesters of algebra and geometry. Presently, I spend every morning studying Algebra 1 and 2 as the sun is just bursting through …