Math and the girls who like it

I was very good at math in high school, I am guessing because I am smart, I study hard, and my friend Bob coached me all through grade school. Well, mostly he waited until I was finally getting the point and then said something very rude under his breath so that I would laugh hysterically and get into trouble, so maybe I give Bob more credit than I ought. Probably it was the studying.

Another thing I'm really good at is retaining vast stores of immediately useful information and disposing of everything else; I stopped knowing how to figure out algorithms (if indeed I ever learned those) the minute people stopped asking me to do it.

I still appreciate numbers though, which is lucky because my beautiful thrummed mittens clash horribly with my luxurious new hat. So naturally, I need another hat, and naturally, the pattern for the first one won't work for the yarn I found to match the mitts. That means I am making up another pattern, which requires me to manipulate the number of stitches so that the hat will stay on and simultaneously taper smoothly on top. I like this kind of math, and the way I keep ending up with multiples of 7 and/or 3. Why don't they teach this in high school?