When friends learn of my plans to return to school for a credential, they always want to know whether I‘m going to teach English or history. They are always somewhat surprised to hear that I want to teach math.

I chose high school math as a credential subject for two reasons. First, the pass rate for the CSET single subject math test hovers between 30 and 40 percent, and the number of candidates who attempt the test is far lower than those in history and English. Our public universities, Cal State and University of California, graduate about a thousand math and science teachers a year combined. Given the scarcity, it makes sense to teach where there’s the most need.

However, my desire to teach math goes beyond a pragmatic assessment of the market requirements. Despite early promise, I struggled in math during high school; a more sensible student would have abandoned math after Algebra II. To this day, passing the AP Calculus test counts as one of the great astonishments of my life. I avoided math in college and was convinced I was simply dysfunctional in the subject. After 15 years of working with computers, I returned to math only to study for my first GRE, and was pleased with my 650 score. However, most of that math was arithmetic, which had always been my one strength.

When my son was a freshman, he needed help with geometry. As a grad school student, I had no money for a tutor, but in the intervening decades since my own troubles, I had learned a great deal about how I grasped new subjects. I dove in and learned more geometry as an adult than I ever had as a 14 year old and was able to help my son. Armed with this success, I was willing to take on the challenge of teaching math through Kaplan, which I thought would be very scripted and leave little room for my error. In fact, Kaplan’s courses can be as scripted or as free-ranging as the teacher desires, and within months I was not only ignoring their script, but coming up with improved methods in some cases.

I never intended to move beyond “test math” (arithmetic, geometry, and first year algebra). However, my Kaplan management and client parents determined that I was unusually good at explaining math to students who usually hate math. As a result, I have rather uniquely learned math “on the job”, as market demand gave me students needing help with advanced math. The first big step happened just six months after I started at Kaplan, when I was assigned to teach and tutor students in the SAT Math 2c, which covers math through trigonometry and pre-calculus. I began tutoring privately in these subjects and at this time am exceptionally strong in all math up to first-year calculus, which I haven’t tutored sufficiently for real expertise. My GRE Quantitative score of last week was an 800, and it wasn’t test prep skills that caused that increase, but the math that I’d learned in the intervening years, as is evidenced by my three passing scores in CSET single subject math.

In contrast to my recent mastery of high school math, my verbal skills have come effortlessly throughout my life. I may have been shocked by my high school AP Calculus score, but I would have been astonished indeed if my AP English Language & Literature test hadn’t been a 5, and my Achievement (now the Subject ) English Literature test score of 800 was so rare that the College Board held up my score reports for two months to verify it. The GRE Verbal section is little more than an extremely difficult vocabulary test; I scored 790 and 780 on both sittings without any preparation at all. I read around 1000 words a minute. I have always been able to easily analyze subtext in poetry, literature, and film. I’m not a superb writer, but I’m fluid and, more relevant for teaching, an effective editor.

I am considered just as effective in teaching verbal subject as I am at math. Hence my friends’ perplexity at my choice of math as my teaching credential subject. Given my unusually strong verbal skills, why math?

Precisely because I had to work at it, I tell them. Most math teachers choose their subject based on their aptitude in math. I came to math through my aptitude in teaching. I am far prouder of my hard-won, if basic, math skills than I am of my considerably rarer verbal abilities. I also have the recent convert’s evangelical desire to spread the word about math: it doesn’t have to be impossible.

Most importantly, I know how to teach math to the vast majority of students who don’t understand it the first time. Because that’s who I was, once.