The past 4,490 days have been pretty darn fun

By admission, traditional math has never been my strong point

I blame it all on the latest and greatest new-fangled educational notion from the 1960s —“New Math.”

This, I swear, sent me spiraling into some calculational black hole. It made passing eighth-grade arithmetic stretch into summer school 1967 and freshman algebra do the same in 1968.

And later, there came the need, and struggle of course, to pass a “math equivalency” exam in order to receive a teaching certificate from Eastern Washington University.

In someone’s mind, knowing those critical skills — adding, subtracting, multiplying a...